St. Petersburg Noir

PEAU DE CHAGRIN By Natalia Kurchatova & Ksenia Venglinskaya Rybatskoye ^{Translated by Marian Schwartz}

This story began when Kolyan, who lived in a redbrick house right under the Vantovy Bridge, found out that the homeless little towhead by the Rybatskoye metro station, where mainly unemployed punks, gypsies, and profiteers collected, was his own daughter Shurka.

In case you don’t know, in his younger days Kolyan was the king of the neighborhood lowlife. Later, by means fair or foul, through an inheritance or a grab, he acquired a small structure right on the Neva, where it still hadn’t been hemmed in by embankments and flowed freely alongside the weed willows, poplars, and mountains of beer cans leftover from the freewheeling picnics of the local proletariat. At one time on this spot there had stood the village of Rybatskoye, whose inhabitants had been given a stela by Empress Catherine the Great in gratitude for voluntarily providing recruits for one of her Swedish campaigns. That’s what the whole district had been called ever since— Rybatskoye.

Kolyan’s little red house was one of the few structures that had survived on the riverbank when the new Vantovy Bridge went up. Unlike older bridges, it had enough clearance to let vessels under, so the Vantovy was never raised. It was also linked by interchanges with the ring road and Obukhov Defense Avenue and formed the basis for an entire transport system. On top of that, it was very beautiful at daybreak, when from the east, from the direction of Lake Ladoga, fluffy peach-colored clouds sailed in; and when they didn’t it wasn’t half bad either. To this day, Kolyan’s little redbrick house clings to the sloping bank, facing the belly of the Vantovy Bridge, which bounces under the transport stream, one of the first in the city to meet the barges going into the gulf from Ladoga, lining up to proceed along the river on a summer’s eve.

Ever since he glimpsed Shurka among the grimy Tajiks and Gypsy kids, Kolyan had become despondent. The thing is, Kolyan hadn’t seen his wife (Had she ever been his wife? Not likely!) for years, and had every reason to believe her dead. More than likely that was the case—but a shadow of doubt lingered. Kolya and Nastya got together in their teens; she was barely fifteen and he had six months until he went into the army. Young and stupid, Nastya got knocked up pretty quick; her mom and granny threw her out and said they’d throttle the baby. Soon after that, Kolyan was called up, and there he had some luck. He didn’t serve in the war but was sent to the Southern Federal District, with the same black guys he’d been beating up on his own turf. Well, he hit the jackpot, raked it in big time, and came back an invalid, with a withered left arm, because he wouldn’t stoop over for the Dags.

He came back and tried to check in with Nastya, naturally. His homeys said that after he left she’d started shooting up and went out in a blaze of heroin. Died of an overdose, crapped-out in a ditch. She’d been living a crummy life, going from one dump to the next, lying down under anyone for a hit. The usual fairy tale in these parts.

Kolyan didn’t grieve for long. Why should he? There was plenty of ass around, and you had to live. He did some driving, did the odd job for a gang, tried all kinds of things, and now, at thirty, found himself the owner of a small redbrick house and his own business.

And then—Shurka. She’d flashed by like a vision in front of the metro station—a skinny teen with grimy knees, torn jeans, and a bright crown of hair. Hair like her mother’s—flaxen curls, a rare breed these days.

To confirm his suspicions, he walked up to Auntie Alla, a Gypsy who sold weed near the station and who knew everyone. “Whose is she?” he asked.

“Oh, that one,” she replied, “that’s Nastya’s daughter, the one who works at the wheelchair factory.”

“Where can I find this Nastya?” he said.

“I won’t tell you the address,” Alla toyed with him, “but you go on Friday, Kolyan dear, to the old textile institute dorm. They sell booze at the entrance, and Nastya’s always there on weekends tricking for cheap.”

Kolyan got the picture, but on Friday he still went to the dorm—a yellow building with windows so narrow that the fat weavers couldn’t jump out to end it all. The freak parade was already starting, but slender Nastya with the flaxen curls didn’t seem to be among them.

“Nastya!” Kolyan shouted on an off-chance.

There was a rustling in the line. A skinny female croaked back at him: “Whaddaya want?”

Kolyan threw his crushed pack of cigarettes on the ground and started back home, under the Vantovy Bridge.

He had nothing left but his kid. He locked himself in his little house for a couple of days with his best friend—a dog named Voldema—and his secretary Zoyenka, who brought him Jack Daniel’s and ham on rye. Kolyan dispatched his faithful muscle—Arif the Uzbek, and Roman, who was half Chechen—to keep an eye on the street kids who hung out by the metro.

A colorful balloon, a scarlet blow-up heart in the little tramp’s hands… The muzhik seemed okay, not scary at all. Offered her some khachapuri. “Come with me,” he said.

He didn’t sound Russian, but had the usual look—broad face, a light stubble up to his eyes, a jersey and tracksuit pants. On the other hand, that babe of his was the ideal for any teenage girl. Miniskirt, black tights (maybe even stockings), a top with rhinestones, the most expensive kind they sell at the market. And, of course, blond. But not straw-dry, just right… an elegant honey color. And made-up. A beauty, in short. A fairy.

“Don’t be afraid, we’ll go together,” the woman said to her. What was she supposed to be afraid of? It’s not like they were going to cut her. Maybe they’d even give her a bite to eat and a dress or something. She was still young, of course—she wasn’t going to smoke or drink vodka, just Jaguar, like the really cool kids in their crowd. Beer was awfully bitter… but Shurka had great respect for Jaguar and other drinks in colorful tin cans that opened with that unmistakable, delicious pssh. In short, she agreed to go with the beautiful lady and the black guy.

But she began to get scared when they drove up to the redbrick house on the edge of the district, practically right under the bridge… There was a time when she loved walking around here—the pretty, shimmering bridge covered in diverging patterns of light, like a piece of sun—and the river, boats big and small, the barges and passenger ships. Shurka was entranced by the loud music and laughter that came from them, the reflections of bright lights dancing on the water. Then a rumor went around about creepy things going on in the red house, and everyone stopped hanging around near there. A few guys did try to take a look, but they never had any stories to tell afterward. A couple of girls a little older than she was had been there. They never did say what went on, but afterward they had money and they started going somewhere in town “to work.”

Inside, the house wasn’t at all frightening: in the big living room, to which the kitchen was attached, all four walls were painted a different, very bright color, and there was equally colorful furniture against each wall. In the middle of the room there were tall lamps with big white umbrellas. And the windows had black film over them.

The pretty woman’s name was Zoyenka, and her companion was Roman. They really did feed her, as promised, and Zoyenka gave her a pretty scarf that was saturated with a yummy tobacco smell and some kind of sweet perfume. From time to time Zoyenka would go into another room, where she would shout at some drunk. Later, Zoyenka brought him into the room. She told Shurka that this was Nikolai…Kolyan. He had a puffy face and inflamed eyes with narrow slits. Nikolai was standing, swaying, and holding his head with his hand. His clothes were clean and crisp—a white jersey with the portrait of some dude, and pressed jeans. He looked around, as if here for the first time, and his glance ran into the towheaded girl sitting on a chair, her hands folded tensely on her pretty little knees. Suddenly he grunted, emitted a drunken roar, and staggered first toward Zoya and then toward Shurka, muttering something unintelligible about “my little girl.” One of his arms, twisted, hung next to his body, but the other bulged with muscles.

And so Shurka began living in the red house on the bank of the Neva, practically under the sunny bridge. Sometimes she thought she’d acquired an excellent family. Zoyenka showed her how to do her makeup, got her off the Jaguar, explaining it wasn’t chic, and in general treated her like her own daughter, something Shurka had never seen from her mother, who had been lost to the bottle a long time ago. A couple of times, after figuring out where Shurka was living, her mother did come to the house and demand they give back her daughter. She and Nikolai would yell at each other for a long time and then Roman or Arif would lead her away—staggering, smelling nasty, and sobbing for all to hear—to the nearest bar. For a couple of weeks her mother would calm down.

And there were days when Maxim, a cameraman, would drive over to Kolyan’s (Shurka couldn’t bring herself to call him Papa), and then Zoyenka would take Shurka to the other half of the house and they would sit there all night. They watched television and ate pastries. Maxim always brought something delicious like chocolate “potatoes”—éclairs or bouchées in cardboard boxes—-and talked, trying not to listen to the sounds from the other half of the house. Then, at dawn, once Shurka had drifted off cozily on the sofa, Zoyenka would hurry to move her back to the other side before going to work. The whole next day Kolyan would sleep. His favorite dog Voldemar, fed his fill by Zoyenka, would sleep too. On days like that at Kolyan’s, when morning came, Zoyenka would already have dashed back to make breakfast. Kolyan grumbled that she’d practically moved in there and forgotten all about her own apartment, to which Zoyenka lightly replied that she and Shurochka had found a common language, and she was thinking about renting her little apartment out to someone.

Shurka never did see Kolyan as drunk as that first day again. When Maxim came, then Kolyan didn’t drink at all, but in all other instances he was usually a little high all day, though never tanked.

Sometimes, sitting in the living room under the huge plasma screen (this was the best place to watch cartoons), or at the kitchen table, or on the rug by the fireplace, next to a peacefully snoring Voldemar, Shurka would catch the pensive and rather unpleasantly heavy gaze of the master of the house. Then she felt not fear but something truly creepy. But Kolyan never said or did anything, instead just ruffled the dog’s velvety coat with exaggerated gaiety, calling him his “golden boy.” Why Voldemar was “golden,” Shurka could not understand—he was black with rusty spots—until Zoyenka explained to her that this was a very expensive dog and brought his master a lot of money. These evenings always ended with Kolyan falling silent, an awkward quiet hanging over them, and him going to his room, at which point Shurka would calm down and convince herself she’d imagined everything.

It was Thursday. A gentle, sunny, and especially quiet day. Lulled by the soft rays of sunset, Shurka was sitting on the riverbank that lovely evening feeding a roll to the greedily quacking ducks. The grasshoppers were making such a racket that the sound wedged under her skin. Brushing the bread crumbs off her shorts, Shurka started toward the redbrick house, looking around out of habit—just in case her mama was getting ready to leap out from somewhere and spoil her mood again.

Maxim’s car was at the house. Shurka as usual thought of cake and pastries and started smiling. The door to the house was locked, but Shurka had taken a key when she left. She opened the door, walked down the hall, and entered the living room. A very bright light blinded her, and the first thing she took in was the sound. Voldemar was whining and yelping in a silly way and a woman was groaning. Then she saw it. She did not throw up and somehow made it to the hall, and she instinctively fled.

Kolyan bellowed helplessly, “Zoyenka!”

She heard the clicking of heels, and Zoya’s soft hands kept Shurka from running outside. She led Shurka to the other half of the house, where the TV was turned on and there were pastries— bouchées and éclairs, her very favorite, damn it all to hell.

“Your papa’s making money… Don’t take it too hard,” Zoyenka muttered rather guiltily. “We all roll any way we can. And we don’t live badly… the plasma TV, the éclairs. Hey, your papa’s got his eye on a car for you and now he can even afford a driver. And he’ll buy it for your eighteenth birthday, have no doubts about that. What kind do you like, girly ones or bigger ones? Red or white?”

Shurka was hiccupping and fighting off waves of bile, but she listened and consented. Why should she be so surprised? This was better than shooting up junk… The sounds in the living room made sense now and for that reason she could hear them better. Her imagination obligingly brought up a picture: her former classmate (they’d dropped out at approximately the same time, only Svetka had mysteriously come into money right away) down on all fours under the Doberman Voldemar… Voldemar was an aristocrat, of course, but he jerked on her just as ridiculously and clumsily as any guy, and he was also grinning and whimpering.

Shurka quickly made her peace with Kolyan’s secret and even decided it was good, creative work, not like sitting in some shop or at some construction site. But something changed imperceptibly in Kolyan himself. His demeanor became even heavier and more intent, and sometimes at supper he would put his good hand on her knee. Under the table, naturally, so Zoyenka wouldn’t see. At first he just let it lie there, then he started stroking, pushing between her knees. This scared the shit out of Shurka.

Then Kolyan lost it. He got ripped with his faithful comrades Arif and Roman on cheap swill from the nearest bar. They howled songs and smashed furniture. Shurka slept in her own room, Zoyenka either in Roman’s or Kolyan’s—they both liked her, though Kolyan was cooler, of course. Kolyan barged into Shurka’s room and started confessing. Still barely awake and not understanding a thing, she huddled at the corner of her bed, pulling her blanket up and trying to hide behind it. Kolyan grabbed her by the feet and started stroking her ankles and begging her for something. Then Zoyenka ran in and she and Roman led him out into the living room. Shurka heard Arif give Kolyan a serious and stern talking-to about Allah. Soon after, Zoyenka returned and hugged Shurka around the shoulders, rocking her.

The next day the house turned into a besieged fortress. Kolyan drove Arif out, Roman left on his own volition, and Zoyenka and Shurka were locked up in the half of the house where they used to eat pastries at night. They sat there like scared little mice, but in the evening he came to them and with a wave of his arm ordered Zoyenka: “Get out.” She shook her head, locked gazes with him, and stayed put. Then he simply grabbed her around her body with his good arm and flung her out the door, slamming it behind her.

“Look, child,” he said, perching on the edge of the table. “No one but them knows that you… that we… well, you understand. Without me, who are you? Homeless, the spawn of a lush. Before you know it they’ll be carting you off to an orphanage, assuming you don’t fuck yourself up first and start getting handed around. I’m suggesting that we live together. And I won’t rush you… I’ll wait… a little while. You’ll live here as always. You’ll be in charge of the house. I’ll give you a fur coat. I’ll buy you a car. Ask for anything you want. Then, when you’re of age, we’ll register. Cross my heart! The Uzbek says Allah ordered us not to… but what’s Allah to me? I sent him fucking packing. Who does he think he is? But me—I’m king here, and I’ll throw out anyone I want. If people love each other, what’s the difference?… You do love me, right? Do you love me…?”

He leaned toward her abruptly and grabbed her face, drew it closer, and stared at her, crazed. Shurka got blasted in the face by the reek of alcohol.

“Anything you want, all you have to do is ask, child, dear child, my little sunshine… Do you love me…?”

The door swung open and Zoyenka appeared on the threshold holding an electric drill. Tear-stained. “All right, back off, you goat! You horny shit!”

Nikolai started laughing and cleared out, landing a good swing at Zoyenka as he left. She went flying into the room, and the drill fell from her hands.

Shurka was sucking a hard candy and listening to Zoyenka, whose eye was gradually swelling shut. Zoyenka wrapped ice from the refrigerator in a napkin and pressed it to her face.

“You said it yourself—he’s going to buy me a car,” Shurka objected soberly. “And later we’ll get registered. That means he’ll buy me a dress too. He said anything I want.”

Zoyenka looked at her as if she were a space alien. “Fool! You haven’t even started your period. He’ll rip you in half. And he’s your papa, for god’s sake!”

She started crying again.

The next day Nikolai came.

“Well,” he said to Shurka, “what have you come up with?”

The girl was sitting on the sofa with her legs folded under her. She clicked the remote. The channels changed on the screen—MTV, cartoons, all kinds of news in Russian and other languages. “A fur coat,” she said. “I want one.”

Kolyan positively glowed. He rubbed his palms and pressed them between his knees. “A fur coat! What kind of fur coat? My little girl…”

“From Voldemar. His fur is so… nice to touch.”

And she shot her blue eyes at him, the bitch.

Kolyan gritted his teeth. “Well, all right.”

To be honest, she thought he would just drown her now. Under the bridge. Because she hadn’t seen Zoyenka since yesterday, and instead a new guy had come—another Azeri, only with lackluster eyes and swollen veins. She recognized the expression right away. A druggie, a goon. He grabbed her by the arm, just the way she was, wearing a T-shirt and shorts, not letting her take her hoodie, or skirt, or jeans, and led her into a small, windowless cell with a mattress on the floor and locked her in.

She lost track of time, but several days passed for sure. There was a cooler in the room and she drank water. Then the lock clicked, the door opened, and Kolyan was standing on the threshold. He was swaying. Shurka backed up toward the wall. Kolyan grinned and threw something at her that smelled of beast and blood. Voldemar’s hide fell heavily on the mattress.

“Tomorrow,” he shook his finger at her. “I’m coming for you tomorrow.”

Zoyenka returned to her that night. She had been thoroughly abused, beaten, and she was missing some teeth. But she had the key.

As she spirited Shurka out of the house under the Vantovy Bridge, she lisped slightly: “You can’t rithk Rybathkoye. I don’t have any money. Go to town on foot… or… there’th a boat in the th-thed. Ith really thkinny… it’ll cut right through!

Zoyenka’s thoughts were confused. “Write me a letter when you get there,” she said. “My name’th Rybina, to Rybathkoye, general delivery. Or find me on v-Kontakte, I’ve got a page there.”

Together they dragged the boat out of the shed, an old Pella. They even found oars. They waited for a barge, and Zoya went into the river up to her knees and gave her a push. Shurka sat in the boat until she was carried off, and then she started rowing. She was strong, little Shurka. The long barge’s sidelights lay on the water and trembled in it. The poplars’ crowns and Catherine’s stela were reflected in the river. Jaguar cans and other trash floated with the current.

On the morning of the second day they made out something stirring in the load of coal. The captain sent Styopa to investigate.

“What is it? Some kind of hide… A dog’s, looks like.”

Styopa gave the hide a kick, and a grimy little towhead crawled out from under it.

DRUNK HARBOR by Lena Eltang Drunk Harbor ^{Translated by Marian Schwartz}

T he money ran out before I knew it, as if I hadn’t stolen anything. I kept it in a heavy, striped model lighthouse somebody I knew gave me—back in the old days, when decent people still came over. One morning I stuck my hand in the lighthouse hoping to pull out a few bills and came up with nothing but greasy dust and my old stash—a joint that had lost even the smell of pot.

Last fall the lighthouse had been stuffed and the money’d been poking into the pointy roof with the mica window. They’d counted my cut honestly, in cash and stones, and I immediately started paying back my debts, even bought my ex-wife’s apartment, which I’d taken a mortgage on in ‘07.1 got myself a couple of suits and a belted cashmere coat, the kind I’d wanted for so long, light-colored, like Humphrey Bogart had in Casablanca; then I met this Latvian girl from the consulate and took her to the shore and rented a cottage for the summer so we could traipse around the Jurmala casino. I sent money to my creditors in small installments, but strictly and regularly, and so as not to raise any suspicions, I told my Latvian that I’d inherited money from a relative abroad and couldn’t spend it in Petersburg—I said I didn’t want to pay taxes to the Russian treasury. The Latvian’s name was Anta, which in the Incan language means copper, but she was a strawberry blonde, not a redhead, and blushed crimson at even the mildest swearing.

But less than a year had passed and the money’d run out, the valuable stones dissolving in bills and interest-owed like a candy emerald in boiling water. I’d put the smaller stones in a fruit-drops box long before and left them with my wife along with the keys to her place; I’d stopped by when she was on duty. She was happy to work the nightshift because she was banging some surgeon from oncology, though it was up to me to support her. I had no desire to see my wife, who would have started harping on about other possibilities, which drives me nuts. I don’t have any other possibilities.

Ever since I broke into the jewelry shop and killed the owner, who showed up out of nowhere, my possibilities have narrowed to the dark slit in the mailbox. My own mailbox, at 22 Lanskaya Street. I’d rented a room on Lanskaya before spring began, and the diamond tucked away for a rainy day lay there under a kitchen floorboard, in a piece of cork. Before I’d kept it in the model iron lighthouse I’d bought in Riga, then Anta zeroed in on my hiding place and I’d had to find somewhere else. Now that rainy day was near, and the time had come to sell off the ice, but my reliable fence wasn’t answering my calls and I was getting nervous.

I knew that one day I’d find a subpoena there and I’d have to clear out of town; I thought about this every morning, waking up in my room with the mold drips on the north wall and the mirror broken out in a greenish mercury rash. There might not even be a subpoena, two guys from the slaughterhouse could just come, handcuff me, force my head down like a stallion at the veterinary, and shove me into a barred van.

The day they came for me I was walking home and I just had a bad feeling; damp clouds were gathering over the roofs, and the January sun had rolled way up where it shone dully, like a czarist coin. I was walking from Kamenny Island, where I’d been to see this scam artist who’d been doing passports since the ‘90s and now lived behind a solid fence not far from the Kleinmichel dacha. I wanted to offer him my last stone—the purest, pear-cut— in exchange for a clean passport with a Schengen visa and twenty thousand cash. Not finding the owner at home, I gave his guard a note and started on my way back, thinking how I could’ve been living in a place like that, with a fountain and brass herons, if I hadn’t frittered away last year’s loot. A sparse snow was falling from the sky, like down from an old lady’s feather bed. It got into my eyes and mouth and even seemed warm to the touch.

Right by my building I slipped on an iced-over manhole and barely kept my feet, almost dropping the paper bag with two bottles of sauvignon I’d bought for the Latvian—I don’t drink wine myself, diligent Jah not taking kindly to rivals. After the thaw the frosts had struck, and the ice in the untidy city turned into black rolled-out paths for sullen pedestrians to plod along, arms out to the sides like tightrope walkers. I didn’t notice the Toyota by the front door right away; it was so dirty it blended in with the sooty yellow facade. Sitting behind the wheel was some dummy in a knit cap who’d cracked the window to tap his ashes in the snow. I might not have recognized him if it hadn’t been for the familiar sleeve poking out the window, and it’s true, he was a dummy if he went on a job dressed in fiery-red nylon. There was no point trying to figure out who my guests were—police or former accomplices. The nastiness would be different in kind but identically leaden.

I decided to wait it out at my neighbor the conductor’s place, hoping she’d be on a run. Once I’d crashed at her place for a few days, and since then I knew where she hid the extra key. Things had taken a bad turn. No matter who these people were, they could move into my attic and sit around drinking tea, waiting for the moment the apartment owner’s patience ran out. Picturing the Latvian sitting on a kitchen stool with tied hands, I could feel my throat smarting, like from cheap tobacco. If it’s cops, then Anta’s sitting on the stool, but if it’s my old friends, she’s lying down with her skirt pulled over her head. I pictured her legs in blue stockings, like the two blades of a split Ottoman saber, and my throat dried up.

Last winter, when I put some of my loot in the mailbox, I did it not in a fit of generosity but as a reliable investment; whatever fell into my wife’s hands could only be wrested away along with her hands. That meant I was free of her letters, phone calls, and fits of insanity for a few years. Now she’d think twice before coming to look for me; she’d slip her take under her shirt and make herself scarce. I locked the mailbox with the key that had been lying in my coat pocket for six months, tossed the key through the slot, thought a second, and threw the apartment key in after it. Now I had one home, one woman, and one stolen crystal of carbon that I planned to sell so I could leave town. The home was someone else’s, the woman was a slut, and there was a wet job hanging over the stone—so if you thought about it, I didn’t have all that much. I had to get away as fast as possible. Some guy I didn’t know who wore a red quilted jacket had shown up more than once and hung around the courtyard trying to look nonchalant. At one time I’d thought he was visiting my neighbor the conductor, who sold a little grass on the side, but when I stopped by and asked her a couple of questions it turned out the guy wasn’t one of her clients, he was some stray wise guy. Or a cop.

I turned into the courtyard, opened the boiler room door, went down the steel stairs quietly, nodded to Timur, the stoker, who was sitting there in a scorched quilted vest, and went out through the janitor’s door on the other side of the building. The conductor’s apartment was on the third floor. Climbing the stairs I peered at the gray Toyota, which was already sprinkled with crumbly snow, so it must have been there at least two hours. No one answered the bell, so I stood a little while on the landing, waiting, and then went to the railing by the elevator, twisted off the cap of a cast-iron snake, and stuck my hand in deep, all the way to the tail. The key was lying there, right where it was supposed to be.

The apartment smelled of stagnant water and rotten stalks. I went on into the bedroom, found a vase of withered roses there, and threw them into the trash can. The roses were long so I had to bend them in half, and a stray thorn poked me in the palm; I saw a drop of blood, and I suddenly remembered how a year before I’d stood in a strange room watching the blood turn black in the small, beady holes on a dead man’s face.

I hadn’t planned to kill the jeweler. I’m a burglar, not a killer. I’d been told the shop would be clean, no one in the apartment above—the owners had gone to their dacha in Pargolovo—and the security system was connected to the local station, Chinese junk, a plastic box with ten buttons. The shop entrance was protected by a corrugated iron curtain, but as often happens, the owner had arranged for one more entrance, from his apartment on the second floor, and one was simpler—a steel door, two rods, and a hole in the floor. The alarm didn’t take me long, and I’d noticed the camera’s dim crimson pupil back on the street when I unlocked the door. It was easily taken off its hook and showed me the wire to the server.

If I were a jeweler buying stolen goods, I’d install a German system with a satellite signal, but the dirty jeweler was a ballsy old man—he even kept his safe in view, under the counter, so he wouldn’t have to go so far. I searched for that safe for half an hour—took pictures off the wall and books off the shelves in the living room, poked my head under the bed, sneezed after getting a noseful of soft gray dust, and felt like a movie gendarme tossing a female student’s room in search of a hectograph and subversive proclamations.

The safe was way under the counter, and I opened it in no time after playing with the last key. There weren’t that many options. The fence who’d cased the job was sure of the first nine numbers, only he hadn’t been able to get a good look at the tenth. I opened the little door and raked up two velvet sacks, a clear one with pale yellow stones, a long box with the necklace promised to the fence, and a fat stack of cash. I got on my knees and was starting to distribute the loot in my pockets when I heard heavy asthmatic breathing, like the creak of a floorboard, and turned around. The old man was standing right behind me holding something shiny high over his head. Whatever it was looked heavy, the size of a bucket, and I glimpsed a chesty shepherdess in a glade with high pointy grass. He was planning to hit me with it but didn’t get the chance.

I remembered his face, even though I only ever saw him for less than a minute—spongy cheeks, folds on his shaved skull, the dim eyes of a deepwater fish, round from surprise. He shouldn’t have been surprised. The stones were of an old-fashioned cut, and they hadn’t been in that safe two days. I grabbed his arm and tried to take the bucket away, but the old man yelled and sank his surprisingly strong teeth into my wrist. That made me see red and I pushed him down on the floor as hard as I could; the shepherdess broke off and stayed in my hand, but the silver glade with the sheep fell on the old man’s face, right on his wide-open, yelling mouth. Silence fell so unexpectedly that I didn’t realize right away that the owner had choked on his own blood, and for a few moments I tried to stop up his mouth with my jacket sleeve.

The old man’s eyes were open and gazing past me at the ceiling, which was thickly overgrown with plaster molding, and I spotted one more camera eye hiding in the leaves. There was no point worrying about the camera because I’d turned off the server, removed the disk, and put it in my pocket. The shop owner, however, was a problem. There was nowhere to take him out, and nothing to take him out in—the old man was a big guy and he would only fit in a trash bag in pieces. I left him lying on the floor with the silver glade jutting out of his smashed mouth, the price tag white on the velvet glade: 299,999. I stuck the shepherdess into my jacket pocket, closed the safe, examined my footprints on the granite floor, grabbed the mop from the storeroom, splashed water on the floor from a pitcher, and gave the dirt a good smearing.

I got out through the apartment over the store, the same way I’d gotten in, went down the back stairs, which for some reason smelled like apples, stopped on the first floor, turned my jacket inside out, pulled my cap down over my eyes, and walked quickly down the street. There wasn’t a soul on the avenue, four in the morning is a dead time, the leaden Petersburg dusk, even the ice underfoot seemed soft and gray.

By the fish store on the corner I came upon a sleepy janitor who asked me for a cigarette. I swayed, grabbing his sleeve, put a whole pack into his hand, and complained about whores in a purposely Eastern accent. That accent and my three-day beard stuck in his mind, so that the sole witness would say he’d seen a tipsy Caucasian walking away from a local girl that morning.

That was late last fall; in the winter I sold my cut to someone I trusted, managed to pay off my debts, bought Gulia the apartment, and spent the rest, and now the day had come when my money was gone and the lighthouse was empty.

Rouser? Rover? Roarer?

I stood on shore trying to read the boat’s name, but in the dusk all I could make out were the first two letters: R and O. Fine, who cares, this was obviously the tub the lush at the station had told me about.

“Going toward Drunk Harbor, turn at the old Lenvodkhoz wharf,” he’d said. “You head down the shore from the datsan, and as soon as you pass the Elagin Bridge turn toward the water, and there it is, it’s got bushes around it and you can barely see the boat, but it’s there.”

The bushes were young and prickly and looked like barberry. I tore my coat sleeve while I was pushing through them in search of a ramp or a gangway, but I couldn’t find anything. The boat was twenty paces from shore, locked in the filthy gray ice, and there were no footprints or boards leading to it. There were long puddles on the surface of the ice, and it was spongy, like bread crust. The hull of the boat wasn’t all that old, but it had rusted through from stem to stern, and the bottom had had concrete poured on it, the former owner probably hoping to take care of a leak. At one time the pilot house had been painted white with three red doors, but all that was left of the white paint now was flakes that resembled shredded eucalyptus bark, and the door latches had been sliced off. I rolled my pants up to my knees, took off my boots, tied them by the laces, hung them around my neck, and started out over the snow barefoot, it being harder to dry footwear than feet—and not only that, these were my only boots and there was no knowing when I would come by another pair.

When I left the conductor’s apartment I already knew I wasn’t going to get in my place. I had almost no money with me, and actually there wasn’t much left at home either. I could forget about picking up the stone. Whoever paid me that visit had left in their scratched-up Toyota, but they could easily have left an ambush in the building, or just planted a bug so they could come back the moment I opened the door. They’d dawdled a long time—I’d sat on the windowsill for two hours until I finally saw my Latvian coming out the front door with two guys. The one on the left hoisted the iron lighthouse on his shoulder like an antiaircraft gunner carrying a rocket launcher. Anta had clearly spilled the beans and now they wanted to smash my hiding place to smithereens. You’re going to have to sweat, archangels.

It didn’t look like they were dragging Anta by force. I couldn’t get a good look at her face, but her walk was easy, and she got in the car smoothly, showing her leg in a high boot. If these were cops they’d let her go quickly, as a foreigner, and they probably wouldn’t bother recording her information. If they weren’t, they’d taken her in addition to the diamond, which they were hoping to find in the lighthouse. Then she’d be back a little later. I left my cell on the table, stuffed my pockets with bread and cheese from the conductor’s refrigerator, took a flat bottle of brandy, and rifled through her dresser but didn’t find anything unusual. Though I did snag a baggie of grass, which I found in a wool sock, didn’t write a note, slammed the door, and tossed the key back in the snake’s tail.

By seven or so I was on Primorsky, and forty minutes after that on shore, a kilometer from Drunk Harbor. The wind was at my back the whole way, and I counted that a good sign.

“Boat’s nobody’s,” the homeless guy told me. “Don’t wet your pants, I spent all fall there until it got chilly, and if no one was using it for sailing then, now I’m sure no one’ll come. Sometimes the locals throw some work my way, loading and unloading, but I can tell you’re a strong fellow, you won’t break. Best not to argue with the locals—if they ask, help, and you’ll have a quieter time of it. In November I dragged a stove onto the boat, plenty of firewood in the forest, only it smoked something awful. I went to the datsan for chow, Buddha Balzhievich’s the abbot, they started feeding people there—only kasha, of course—but at least you don’t have to go scrounging in town.”

I’d ended up at the station, where I met the homeless guy, out of stupidity. Not only did I have no reason to leave Petersburg, I didn’t really have anywhere to go, I had next to no money, my mother in Gatchina wouldn’t let me cross the threshold, and in the last year my buddies had become few and far between. Habit kicked in—hit the station and get out of town—but now things were different, and all I needed was to crash for a few days, keep an eye on the apartment from a safe distance, and somehow get to my kitchen. I was sitting in the station snack bar pecking at a cold omelet with my fork when this guy in a camouflage jacket sat down at my table and asked me to treat him to a drink—preferably two. I bought us each a shot of vodka and shared my omelet with him, and at that my change ran out, and my only thousand left in my wallet I’d stashed safely away that morning, for a rainy day. That shot got the man so muddled that he started calling me Stasik, grabbing my sleeve with his calloused paw, and dropping his face in his hand with a mournful look. This last part I understand, actually—I myself might as well have dropped my face in my hand, only I would’ve had to have drunk ten times as much.

I glanced at him and thought about the cops at my place on Lanskaya. It could be the people I worked for a year ago, for a whole winter, and in the spring I said I was tired and jumped ship. I cracked four safes for them like Easter eggs. The last job was a surgeon, a collector of precious stones, that was quite a haul, but they held back my cut, said I’d done messy work at the jewelry shop, botched it, and they’d had to pay off some people. Perhaps my accomplices came to Lanskaya, deciding that if I hadn’t worked for a whole year I’d stashed away a tidy sum, and if they cleaned me out I’d come crawling to them faster for a new assignment. In retrospect, they must’ve worked Anta over a long time ago. In the fall I’d noticed her asking incoherent questions, looking around furtively, and basically acting like an Estonian washerwoman. Of course, she’d searched the place long before—the pig with the white face rooted up the whole place—but I let it go, deciding I wasn’t giving her enough to cover expenses, and started giving her more.

Anta was a minor pawn at the consulate, one step above cleaning lady, but she knew how to parlay her sweet diplomatic butt, which she brought to work by noon, carrying her office shoes in a paper bag. Anta did have kind of a big butt, but her legs were made for basketball, they went on forever.

Skirting the boat, I saw a tree trunk to port that had one end resting on a stack of icy debris and the other on the iron railings. There was also a line of six small portholes to port, sealed tight, and there were old tires strung on a rope along the side. I grabbed onto one as I was pulling myself toward the railings, but it slipped out of my hands and I nearly collapsed back on the ice. I climbed on deck, sat on a coiled towline, and put on my boots, though they slid on the iron like skis down a mountain slope. There was a gaping black hole where the wheel had been, and the searchlight looked like a tin can—though a Chinese alarm clock jutted out of the compass niche, probably left by the previous lodger.

I couldn’t open the door to the deckhouse, I just smashed my fingers for nothing, not that there was anything to do there—the glass had been shattered and inside was a slab of gray ice. I lit one of my last two cigarettes, and standing at the stern surveyed the shore. Far off, to starboard, loomed Krestovsky Island, looking like the face of a sperm whale; straight ahead was Elagin, black; and from the park past Drunk Harbor I could hear the lively metallic voice of a carousel.

While I was scoping out my new quarters, the wind died down and wet snow started to fall, more like rain. My fleece soaked straight through and became heavy, like a greatcoat; I’d put it on in the morning so I wouldn’t look like a bum at my meeting with the passport dealer, and now I regretted not choosing something sturdier. Remembering the bum had said something about a cabin, I threw my cigarette overboard, walked across the deck, and discovered, next to the capstan, a hinged hatch on three busted bolts, and an iron rod stuck between the hatch and deck to keep it from slamming shut.

I dropped into the hold and saw a basket of firewood on the table in the galley and an army stove squeezed into the cabin, and I burst out laughing. I’d had the exact same stove, loud and stinky, in my tent during muster outside Lisy Nos in the late ‘90s, when I was a reserve captain, not a thief. I found a stack of greasy girly magazines in the cabin, lit the iron stove, though not easily, shed my coat, and covered up head to toe with a prickly blanket, thinking about how if anyone pulled out the rod, for laughs, say, the hatch would shut and they’d be carrying me out in a tin box. Then I thought that it really didn’t matter, was surprised at the thought, and conked out till morning.

I was able to shave in front of a shard of mirror attached to the galley wall, a rusty Gillette blade with dried foam lay in the soap dish, and when I saw it I remembered my train station friend repeating, stammering insistently, “Shave before you go to the datsan, you’ve got to look neat, not down and out.” The morning was chilly and dry, the gray ice sparkled in the sun, and about ten paces from the boat there was a black hole in the ice, like a mercury puddle, left by fisherman, and poking up around the hole were stakes with a metal net stretched between them. Ducks, half-crazed for lack of food, were jostling by the hole, trying to stick their beaks through the net, and I rejoiced to think maybe a box of fish had been left there. It would be nice to fry up a couple of whitefish for breakfast, I’d seen a bottle of congealed oil in the cockpit and an iron skillet.

It was odd, I was two steps from Primorsky Avenue but I felt like a shipwreck survivor cast on a deserted shore. I found a pot in the galley and dropped a pipe down to the ice and walked over to the hole for water and someone else’s catch. The spiky net had been dropped deep into the hole—hell if I knew why, maybe so the edges wouldn’t cover over; I don’t know, I never liked fishing. I tried to pull out the wire, but it was frozen solid to the thick ragged edges, so I knelt down, leaned over the hole, and jumped straight back. Looking up at me was a man’s face, his mouth spread in a smile, dark river water in his eyes.

I pulled out one of the stakes, perched on the edge of the hole, and armed with it, like a boathook, I snatched the scarf off the wire and tried to push the dead man back under the ice. If he’d floated here from Drunk Harbor, the current might carry the drowned man farther, toward Krestovsky Island, and the cops could fish him out there, at the Chernaya River. The scarf unwound and was left hanging on the wire net, but the body bumped into the icy edges and floated meekly onward, trailing light hair, like wet yarn. He was wearing an expensive jacket, which meant whoever’d thrown him into the water wasn’t a thief, a local showdown most likely, the Lakhtas against the Olginos. That was how I was going to float if I fell into my former companions’ hands, only I didn’t have a scarf and had nothing to snag, I’d float off leaving nothing behind.

I didn’t feel like collecting water in that hole, so on my way I filled the pot with dirty snow and put it on the stove, which heated up amazingly fast. I’d picked up a piece of wood before climbing aboard, used it to replace the iron rod keeping the hatch from slamming shut, and stuck the rod under the folding cot because somehow my quarters didn’t seem quite as peaceful to me as they had the night before. My breakfast of cheese, smelly after sitting overnight, and stale bread didn’t exactly thrill me, so I decided to try the conductor’s joint, which turned out to be so strong I didn’t wake up until dusk, and then not on my own but because someone was tugging at my shoulder.

Half-asleep but snapping to, I pushed the uninvited guest away, dropped my feet from the cot, rummaged on the floor for my rod, and only then unglued my eyes and took a good look at the guy, who seemed large and saggy in the dim light leaking through the open hatch.

“Why’d you do that?” the person said in a reedy eunuch voice. “Are you shitfaced? Put down the stick, Luka, or you’ll kill me by accident.”

“I won’t kill you,” I said when I was fully awake. “Where the fuck did you come from?”

“Have a drink?” The person reached for something, making me jump up, but just pulled out a bottle of vodka, waving it in peace and hiding it away again.

“Why don’t you come out and we’ll talk on deck?”

The person wheezed and climbed up clumsily, and his coat was too long so the hem kept catching on the narrow, corrugated steps. When he reached the top of the stairs, the stranger swiveled around, gathered up his hem, and sat at the edge of the hatch, placing his feet firmly on the last step. Now I could see his eyes—long and a little puffy. His hair was gathered under a wide fur hat, but by now I’d realized he was a woman and relaxed. After I’d climbed two steps I caught her smell, sharp, lemony, a little like the furniture polish my Latvian used. Polishing furniture and combing her hair, those were the two things she could do from morning till night, humming her monotonous “Kas to teica, tas meloja.”

“My feet got soaked getting here—what did you do with the logs? Use them up for heat? I have to dry my boots now!” My visitor swung her feet in front of my face, leaned over, took a good look, and gasped.

“Holy moley! Who are you, muzhik? And where’s Luka?”

“Gone. I live here now,” I said cautiously, holding onto her boot tops so I could pull the woman down in case she had a mind to do something foolish like slam the hatch. But the beggar’s girlfriend never even thought to be nervous, she just went silent briefly, then got out her lighter and shined it in her face.

“Let me in and get warm. I’m pretty. I can’t go back to Primorsky with wet feet. I’ve got a bottle!” She pulled her present out of her shirt and licked her lips. Her mouth was conspicuous, with bright turned-out lips, a working mouth.

“I’ve got my own bottle.” I hopped back into the hold, signaling for her to come down. “Be sure you close the hatch carefully, you’ve got to slip that branch in there.”

“I know,” she responded gaily. “It’s not my first time. Are you going to be here now instead of Luka? That bastard didn’t say a word to me. He and I agreed on noon, but I got held up at the datsan, they had Sagaalgan there at dawn and fed everyone pot cheese and sour cream and afterward my girlfriend and I stayed to clean up. I even put on my nice dress and got all dirty with ashes!”

“Why do you go to the datsan? Are you a Buryat or something?” I tossed some twigs in the stove, the fire came up and started hissing, and the woman laughed and began undressing. The smell of lemon polish got noticeably stronger. She disrobed silently and efficiently, shaking out her hair—she turned out to have quite a lot of hair, a whole heap of it, I can’t imagine how she tucked it all under her cap. The Buryat turned out to be naked under her dress, no underwear, the ashen fur on her pubis reminded me of a crow’s nest. Tossing her rags on the other cot, she climbed under the quilted blanket and crooked her finger at me.

“Let’s do it quick, Luka, climb on in, I missed you. It’s putting out so much heat I don’t feel the cold!”

“Woman, have you gone blind or something? I told you, he’s left, gone.”

“That means you’ll be Luka now.” She pulled the blanket down so I could get a glimpse of her breasts, which looked like two cantaloupes, and her taut belly with a tattoo, but there wasn’t enough light and I couldn’t make out the drawing. “Come here. The other one, the one before, he had another name too, only I didn’t ask.”

The cantaloupes, when squeezed, turned out to be overripe, and the Buryat’s uncombed hair kept getting in my mouth, making me spit. The woman was at least forty, and she creaked and tossed and turned like a millstone—two days before I would’ve thrown something like that out of my bed, but now I couldn’t be choosy. Not only that, she had nothing against smoking a joint and even showed me how to make a pipe if I ran out of cigs but had a ballpoint pen. Toward morning, having smoked up all the grass, I told the Buryat about the dead man in the hole, and right then, at last, she surprised me.

“You mean you left him floating?” She got up with a jerk and sat down at the foot of the cot we’d fallen off long before; we were now lying on our spread coats. “Drag him out and bury him! Luka used to do that—did you see the ash crosses on shore? That’s where he did it.”

“Go to hell.” All of a sudden I felt cold and I got up to bring in firewood from the galley. “Am I your local gravedigger? He’s clearly been floating a long time, this corpse. Where do they come from, Drunk Harbor or something?”

“I don’t know where,” my guest said sullenly. “I know it’s often. You have to bury them.”

She stood up and started collecting her rags, muttering something under her breath. I got dressed too, took my heat-warped boots off the stove, and struggled to pull them on. We climbed on deck and the wind off the gulf struck us in the face. The snow slurry hanging in the air was so solid that at first I took it for snatches of fog that obscured the shoreline, but it plastered my face and hair, and very quickly I was having a hard time breathing.

The Buryat wouldn’t go down by the pipe, she climbed over the railing near the radio cabin, sat on the edge of the boat, lowered her feet to the guardrail, swiveled around familiarly, stood on a tire, and hopped down to the ice, holding onto the line. I followed her, trying to repeat her movements, but the hem of my coat caught on a rusty plate and I went flying, the ice cracking underneath me. The blow killed my buzz immediately: I felt as naked as a dog, my coat was soaked, and my back under it was instantly covered in gooseflesh. The woman was walking so fast that by the time I got up and shook myself off she was already at the hole and standing there, bent over the wire net, from a distance resembling a fisherman in her stupid fur hat.

“Luka!” she shouted, waving the yellow scarf at me. “He’s here! Come on…”

I couldn’t make anything out after that, her voice drowned in the viscous snow, which blocked up my ears and nostrils. When I reached the hole I knelt and saw that smooth face hanging in the water. There was no hair on his head, which meant it had been a wig and the current had carried it away. I remember I also thought that the drowned man had been hiding from someone too, poor devil. He never did find his boat.

There was nothing to grab onto. He had lost his jacket, and the sweater I tried to grab with two stakes, like a two-tined fork, immediately disintegrated into rot, revealing the dead man’s hairless, puffy, baby-doll chest. We messed around for half an hour or so, and in that time the body went under the ice a few more times, slipping from view, but by some miracle came back. Finally I made a noose out of the scarf, caught the dead man’s head in it, and dragged the body onto the ice, nearly breaking his neck.

At dawn the wind died down and the shore was again marked by an even line, with a black, shaggy chaff of barberry and alder, and between the bushes I made out a few crosses, which from a distance looked like a pet cemetery. We dragged the dead man on shore and dug a shallow grave—just in the top layer of snow because it made no sense to try to dig the frozen ground. His face was clean, the fish hadn’t yet touched it, and the Buryat tried to shut his eyes but his lids popped back stiffly. I threw snow over the body and poked a cross tied with the yellow scarf into the drift.

In the cockpit even the walls were covered with hoarfrost, and there was an old burnt smell coming from the stove. I had to find firewood to dry our clothes, but I was so wrung-out that I picked up the boathook and made splinters of the plank partition separating the galley from the cabin.

The woman gathered the pieces, deftly heated the stove, stripped naked, pulled an opened bottle of vodka from a recess, sprawled on my cot to get warm, and immediately fell asleep. I stuffed stale bread into my mouth, grabbed her fur cap for camouflage, and went to town as I was, in my wet coat. I didn’t feel like kicking the Buryat out, and sleeping with her was rough going: in the light of day I got a good look at her worn face and flat cheekbones and the two scars that slashed her cheek crosswise.

No sooner had I emerged onto Primorsky Avenue than my morning troubles dissipated, and when I got to the metro I caught myself thinking that I was rejoicing at the sullen stream of underground people I used to pick my way through, choking on longing and stench—though this happened no more than a couple of times a month, when the city was stuck in a traffic jam and I was late. I bought a hot dog and scarfed it down without leaving the stand, and then I bought another and finished it in the train car, dripping grease on my coat, and then accidentally saw myself in a darkened window and laughed: I looked like a beggar despite my clean-shaven face.

Fine. The worse, the better.

Emerging at my station, I circled around along Torzhkovskaya so as to approach the building from the other side, loitered on the square, slipped into the school, went up to the fourth floor, and checked out my windows. The kitchen window was open, the same as two days before, and the green curtain was flapping in the breeze at the sill, which meant Anta had not returned— she couldn’t stand drafts. I went down to the school cafeteria, stopped a kid of about thirteen at a table of trays, slipped him a hundred, and promised him two more, since that was all I had. The schoolkid wrote down the apartment number on his grimy wrist and ran over to my building, and I followed him, pulling the cap lower over my eyes.

After standing by the front door for a few minutes, I went in after the kid, heard him ringing at the apartment and kicking the door, as he’d been told, and then talking with the neighbor who came out to see what all the noise was about. The kid came down, extended his hand for the money without a word, and flew out like a shot, apparently because I looked pretty shady. It was cold in the apartment, like outside, and there was a puddle on the floor where water had come in from the windowsill. The furniture was turned over, the chairs thrown around, books and clothes piled in a heap in the middle of the living room—a search is a search. The whole kitchen was sprinkled with broken glass, like tooth powder, and the Latvian’s torn bra was on the table, her panties nowhere in sight—either they’d managed to have a good time with Anta, holding her blond head to the table, or else they’d just undressed her to scare her, it didn’t matter now.

I pushed the empty china cabinet aside, lifted the floorboard, pulled out the piece of cork, snagged the diamond with a fork, removed my boot, and shoved the stone in my sock. Then I went into the bedroom, where there was a spot in the middle of the bed that looked like a wine stain, wrestled on two sweaters, collected money from all the drawers, and headed back out, crunching on the glass dust. Turning onto Aerodromnaya, I called the fence from a pay phone, but he didn’t answer, and I had to leave a message, although in my position it wasn’t terribly intelligent. I said I’d call tomorrow at the same time and that I had a pear for anyone who had twenty well-done steaks. An idiotic code, but he liked it, the crappy conspirator. Saying this made me hungry and I quickly hit a shawarma stand, then went back to the harbor on foot, through Serafimovskoye cemetery.

The woman wasn’t on the boat. There was an empty bottle on the table in the cockpit, the stove was stuffed with firewood, and there was a lipstick heart on the hatch leading to the fore-peak. I fired up the stove, smoked a couple of reefers, threw the stinking rags off the bed, wrapped up in the blanket, and fell asleep. I had a hunting dream, though I wasn’t the hunter or the prey but someone else. Before I woke up I dreamed of a vixen, a dazzling vixen being chased across an empty white field by hounds. It was heading for the forest, racing. It wasn’t going to make it, I thought, when I saw the pack getting closer, but then the fox stopped short, swiveled around, dug its front paws into the snow crust, let out a howl, and turned into a small dog. The hounds ran up to it, sniffed the snow-covered dog face, and rushed on. Opening my eyes, I saw the light was already oozing through the crack between deck and hatch, the February wind droning on the other side of the iron wall, and it felt as though the boat was rocking, ready to set off, and I quickly climbed out. The weed was still clinging inside my head, and scraps of fog were floating before my eyes, but when I glanced toward the island I saw the hole and sobered up instantly.

The yellow scarf was fluttering on the wire net. Huh? Walking up to the hole I already knew who I’d see there, and I wasn’t wrong. I peered at the drowned man’s tranquil face and slowly walked toward shore—there was no cross in the drift, there wasn’t even a drift, just level ground, a little trampled, they could have been our own prints, mine and the datsan cleaning woman’s. I managed to break off a thick branch from a bush close to shore and poked it through the middle of the grave. There was nothing under the snow.

Had the dead man returned to the water? Or was this a different dead man? Or did he jump in the water like a white-throated dipper to escape a hawk, walk along the bottom, and then calmly climb out from under the ice? I returned to the hole, knelt, and poked at the floating body so the face would appear from under the ice crust. The face was just as smooth, and the hair was fair, only instead of a shirt this fellow had a clown’s black bow tie on his bare neck. It looked as though he’d been killed at a party, or after the party, during a friendly orgy on a yacht. They might well have been killed simultaneously, only the second one didn’t get here right away and got snagged somewhere else on his scarf, at some other fishing hole. Damn, they couldn’t have identical rags on their neck. Where was the first one? No, this was the same guy, no question.

The Buryat decided to play a little joke on me, that’s all. She’d hooked the drowned man’s bow tie and dragged it back to the hole. She’d had her revenge for my not wanting to wind her beastly hair on my hand and go at it with her on that narrow cot in the unsqueamish Luka’s place. All right, woman, do this again and you’ll be the one floating with a bow tie around your neck. I went back to the vessel for the boathook and rope, pulled out the drowned man, who looked bizarrely fresh, dragged him over the ice to the shore, and buried him in the same place but didn’t stick a pet cross in, and tied the yellow scarf to a handrail on the gangway. When I’d brewed the last of the tea, I heard voices near the boat and climbed on deck, went into the latrine, and peered out through the porthole. Fishermen were standing a few meters from shore, examining the hole, but they were reluctant to move any closer. One of them, wearing a down coverall, gestured and I heard something like honeycombs and yellow.

I spent the day in Lakhta, there was no point showing my face in town, and by now the boat made me sick. I bought brandy, drank it on the shore sitting on a solidly frozen log, relaxed, and tried to call the Latvian a few times, but she apparently had either turned off her phone or just didn’t want to talk. A couple of months earlier Anta had told me that they had a program at the consulate that could pinpoint the location of any employee, therefore she took the battery out of her phone when she played hooky from work. This had made an impression and I’d surrendered to a moment’s paranoia, leaving my phone in the conductor’s apartment. At least I didn’t toss it in a ditch.

It was too cold to sleep, I had enough wood left for a couple of hours, and toward morning I picked up what was left of the partition and used it for heat along with the wood carving of Esenin that was hanging over the bed. When I woke up, I went to the hole and checked out a new dead man. This one had the scarf wrapped up to his ears so all you could see was his smooth, celluloid forehead and whitened, pruney cheeks. His hands were in his jacket pockets, as if he’d been searching for his wallet or cigarettes before dying, and in general his look was bizarrely matter-of-fact, sullen even.

Load-unload, that meant. There’s the job the locals have thrown your way, you sorry-ass beggar, I thought, observing the long scarf bobbing in the water like a floater on a giant’s fishing rod. He cleaned up after criminals, sly old Luka, founder of the seasonal cemetery. In a couple of weeks the snow would melt and your burials were going to go floating down the Greater Nevka past Elagin Island. I’d like to know where they sunk them so cleverly that they all landed here, near the harbor. Though who said I’d seen them all? Maybe they’d released an entire excursion under the ice and I was just getting the guides in identical scarves.

All right, boys, I’m done being your gravedigger. I’m clearing out of here in a couple of days and you can catch your own rotten smelt. I took a walk as far as the shore, examined the footprints in the snow next to yesterday’s grave, collected a bucket of snow, and returned to the boat. After I’d started making breakfast I suddenly realized I couldn’t eat and drank some hot water with sugar I found in the galley. Then I shaved in front of the shard of mirror, cleaned my coat, and walked down the shore to Staraya, to the Datsan Gunzechoinei.

“You sit alone too often,” I was told by the monk I asked about the slant-eyed woman, showing him the cap she’d lent me. “You sit alone and think about women. You’re already late for the khural, it ended at noon. And if you came for the seminar of the venerable lama, then get your five hundred rubles out and go to Malaya Pushkarskaya. Not now, in two weeks.”

“What seminar’s that?” It was clear I wasn’t getting past the gates.

“The practice of samatha and vipassana.” The monk was hunched over in the wind in his robes, but he spoke with me willingly. “Or maybe you want a lunar calendar? You’ll know your bad days.”

“Lately that’s been pretty clear without a calendar. Maybe you do remember the woman after all, she looks like a Kalmyk, rosy-cheeked, with lots of hair. She was at the New Year’s celebration, and before that she cleared the snow from the courtyard.”

“Women come to us to help with the housekeeping, but I don’t know their names.” The monk frowned. “You can leave the cap here and she’ll see it herself. Come at three o’clock, we’ll pray together. For a favorable reincarnation and for the departed.”

“I’ve got stacks of departed,” I said mechanically, and all of a sudden I bumped into his attentive gaze. The monk’s face was ochre and doughy, and for some reason I imagined him shaving his head with a curved, ivory-handled Tibetan knife. He turned and started down the alley toward the sloping stairs with the columns, signaling me to follow. Hanging above the datsan entrance was a wheel that resembled the wheel on my boat, only that had been hacked to pieces and was lying on the floor in the pilothouse.

“Have you ever dreamed that bamboo was growing out of your head?” the monk asked. “Or a palm growing out of your heart?… Why are you limping?”

“I broke the heel on my left boot at a train crossing. I’m living on a boat,” I added for some reason, “and I dream of dogs chasing a vixen.”

“You spend too much time alone,” the monk repeated, leaving me by the doorway. “You should see people. Take a walk here, look around. We need a boilerman, a jack-of-all-trades. The roof leaks, there’s lots of work.”

“Oh no, lama, I’m not here about that.” All of a sudden I felt cheerful. “I may not be a church thief, and I don’t rob temples, but I don’t advise you to let me into the cabbage patch. I might not be able to help myself.”

“I’m not a lama,” the monk said, turning away from the doors, “and you’re no thief. You’re Luka, the man from the boat.” I had no desire to tour the datsan, so I waited for the monk to go inside and then went back to the street in search of a phone booth, cursing myself for ditching my Nokia so hastily. The fence was home, but he was reluctant to speak to me—even the description of the ripe pear didn’t excite him, and eventually he told me to meet him at the French café on Petrogradskaya, but he immediately added that I’d have to wait awhile for my steaks. Not only that, twenty was a bit much, the trickster commented gloomily, I’d have to make do with sixteen, since they were looking for me all over town. I said we’d talk there, but as I hung up I already knew there was no point talking, his type had an animal instinct for other people’s troubles.

The city stretched on like a solid snowy canvas, my ruined boot had taken on water, and I had to drop into a cheap cobbler and buy whatever they had—loafers on a ripple sole. In the repair shop I spent a long time looking at the guy, who seemed familiar, he was obviously the shop owner because he was chewing out the salesman for some cracked window. As I left the store I realized what had made me stare at him. The owner had a yellow scarf wrapped around his neck, kind of dirty, as if it had been pulled out of the river.

Reaching Petrogradskaya in my new boots, I went into the café, took a free newspaper from the counter, ordered a brandy, and got ready to wait for the fence. There were only two people and the waiter, who was wearing an idiotic getup with braids. The floor was sprinkled with sawdust, in the Parisian manner, to make the mud easier to clean up. The second customer was sitting by the window chewing something, he had a mug of mulled wine in front of him, and the light from the window fell on his hair, which looked like soaked linen thread. The guy must have been wandering around town all day without a hat, I thought, but then he turned around and I saw his face.

“You’re not missing anyone?” I myself don’t know what power lifted me from my chair and made me walk up to the blond guy. “You look like a dead man I know… sorry, like someone I saw recently. He looks an awful lot like you, like your brother really. Are you looking for him?”

“You want money?” He raised his eyes to me, dark and quick, like the river water under the ice.

I’d already raised my arm to punch him in the nose, but the waiter appeared beside the table with another steaming mulled wine, and his scornful look told me that I hadn’t shaved for two days and I looked like a tramp in my damp, ash-spattered coat.

“The alms seekers have multiplied. Here, take it.” The guy dug up change from his jacket pocket and sprinkled it on the table. I recognized the jacket too, and my mind went dim. Blood surged to my temples, I leaned on the table and looked into his eyes. His face was smooth and welcoming. I remembered how two days before I’d thrown spongy gray snow on that face, trying not to look at the snow-dusted eyes and the dark depression of his sunken mouth.

“Listen, buddy.” The waiter put his hand on my shoulder. “You need to get out of here, leave the man alone.”

“He’s a dead man,” I said, pointing to the blond man. “Touch his hair, it’s linen yarn. My granny would hang some like that on her fence to dry, and then she’d straighten it with a steel comb. He’s a drowned man, I buried him, but he dug himself out and ran away.”

“I see.” The waiter let go of my shoulder. “Get moving, sicko. Don’t worry about the brandy. It’s on the house.”

“Hey, look.” I reached out cautiously to tug at the man’s bangs. “He’s going to be bald now, and if you give him a swift kick he’ll fall to pieces.”

The guy moved my hand away, stood up straight, proving taller than I’d thought, pushed his chair back with a rumble, and started for the exit. I followed him, hearing the waiter’s voice behind me.

“Kind gentleman, your two mulled wines and croissant?”

The blond guy pulled a five hundred out of his pocket and threw it on the floor, on the dirty sawdust. I walked out after him and tried to grab his sleeve, but he pushed me with such unexpected force that I flew back into the café’s window, slipped, and struck my temple on the stone sill. Blood gushed into my eyes,

I sat down, leaned against the wall, and wiped my face with my sleeve. The drowned man sped off, and for a while I could see the shiny blue dot of his jacket in the crowd, then I lost it. I tried to get up but couldn’t, and I remained sitting. Pedestrians gathered around me, a fellow in a leather jacket started clicking his cell—I think he was photographing me, the bastard—the curious waiter stuck his head out the door like a lizard, some girl chirped something about the police, and I gestured that I was fine—but it was too late.

“Can you stand?” A cop who had come out of nowhere leaned over me. “The van’s on its way, I called it. Do you have your ID? Citizen, can you hear me?”

I could, but I couldn’t speak, the air was thick, and I had a hard time pulling it through my windpipe. I’ve got to get out of here, I thought, feeling the bills in my pocket, small change. I had to get out of here, I had the diamond in my sock, they’d find it if they searched me, and this would all get many times worse. I couldn’t go to the station.

What would I tell them? That I was a fence? That the river was giving birth to monsters? That for the first few days they were helpless and couldn’t climb out of the hole? That I had to drag them out so that they could rise after a few hours, shake themselves off, and head to town?

That this was the cycle of dead water in nature? That Petersburg was in danger?

The first thing they would do would be to pull my file, then they’d beat me in the kidneys, and then they’d call the orderlies. That was at best. At worst they’d find that dodgy old jeweler with knocked-out teeth and the glade with the silver sheep. The blood was pouring down my cheek and now creeping onto my neck.

“Listen, friend,” I said with difficulty. “Lean over. I have a stone worth twenty grand in my sock. Take off my boot, take the sock, and put me in a taxi. And do it quick, before your guys come. Come on, before I change my mind.”

After getting all this out, I heaved a sigh, stretched my leg out, and shut my eyes. An eternity passed, the cop was in no hurry, I could hear the street noise—the rattling windows, the streetcar rumbling, the radio muttering, the shuffling of soles over the wet snow—but still no sirens. The gawkers seemed to have started to disperse, and I no longer heard their alarmed voices.

“What, are things really that bad?” the cop whispered, leaning toward my ear. “Stop it, this is just a scratch. It would be different if you’d been smashed in the head with a silver ingot.”

He smelled palpably of slime and diesel. I unglued my eyes. Or rather, just my right eye because the left wouldn’t open anymore. The cop’s smooth, welcoming face spread like an oil spot in water. Behind him there was some lady with a string bag looming, and behind her the young woman who had shouted about the police, a linen fringe covering her forehead all the way to her eyebrows. Behind the young woman was a snow-covered square with a view of Kamennoostrovsky Prospect. There were people walking down the avenue, a lot of people, a whole lot of people, more than usual in this part of town. I couldn’t make out their faces, but I knew that many of them were wearing yellow scarves. I looked at them with one eye until the siren went up at the corner of Avstriiskaya Square.

“Get up, Luka,” the cop said, holding out his hand to me. “The van’s here. Very well, we’ll drop you off at work.”

BARELY A DROP by Andrei Rubanov Liteyny Avenue ^{Translated by Marian Schwartz}

T he writer headed off an hour before midnight.

Usually he took the sleeping car: he liked his comfort and did not care for traveling companions. In fatter, richer times he might take a whole double. For the sake of solitude.

His best friend once said, “Don’t confuse solitude and loneliness.”

Now leaner times had come upon the writer. He wasn’t poor, of course, but he had no desire to pay extra for solitude. Thirty-nine. At that age you no longer feel like paying the world extra; it’s time to arrange things so the world pays you. And the sleeping cars were worse now. The creak of cheap plastic, the gray sheets. The brown railroad dust. Last time he’d traveled with his son. He’d wanted to show the boy springtime Petersburg; it had been a cold May, and the heat on the train wasn’t working. (The conductor apologized nonchalantly: “It broke; we’re fixing it.”) The writer froze and promised himself he would never travel in sleeping cars again. The cold and dirt—that was no big deal. He’d known worse in prison and barracks. Only there it was part of the rules of play, whereas here it just added to his irritation. A train plying between the two capitals and made up of “luxury” cars should be heated on cold nights, right?

So this time he took a regular compartment. He tossed his meager backpack on the rack, went out into the passageway, and waited for his neighbors: first an unshaven guy with an ordinary man’s ordinary face; then a young woman with a light smile and a heavy ass skillfully raised on too-high heels. She might have worn simpler footwear for travel, the writer thought censoriously, and he headed for the dining car without lingering.

He had found muddle-headed, unintelligent women annoying since his early youth. For some reason, though, he was drawn to the muddle-headed types more than the others. Muddle-headedness has its own energy and charm too.

One day he chose the least muddle-headed of all the muddle-headed women he’d met and married her.

In the dining car he immediately felt good. He had a shot of vodka, turned on his computer, and started working. The vodka had nothing to do with it. He liked his work. And travel. Spatial displacement was stimulating. The writer valued detachment. To describe something, you have to detach from it.

He wrote for two hours, then was tired and had another drink—not because of his weariness but in order to prolong his pleasure. A little later the young woman came into the dining car with the same heels, the same smile, and the same ass, and sat down opposite him. The writer—an experienced night train passenger—had gone to the dining car earlier than the others and now occupied a four-seat table; he had set up his smart electronic device among the coffee cups and not a single hungry person had sat down with him all evening. Everyone had appeared in groups or pairs and found free seats without disturbing the writer; or, more likely, they had taken the writer not for a writer but for the restaurant manager tallying his debits and credits, since the table was the last one, next to the kitchen. Whatever it was, the writer was not surprised at the stranger’s proximity. It is fairly risky, when you have such high heels, to sit alone in a dining car at two in the morning when four traveling salesmen—wet brows, ties askew—are dozing in one corner, and two crew-cut alpha males, together weighing five hundred pounds, are drinking beer in another. If the writer were a young woman in heels, he would have sat with someone like him. Short, almost sober. Computer on his left, notebook on his right.

And so, she was on her way to see her lover. She was free, he was married; she was in one city, he was in the other. He didn’t want to divorce (his kids? the writer asked; his companion nodded), he paid for her weekly trips and hotel (generous, the writer said; his companion shrugged).

The writer introduced himself as a writer and added that the titles of his books were scarcely known to the general public.

She livened up a little.

He bought her alcohol.

“I feel like a fool,” she admitted, relaxed after her third shot. “The relationship has no future. I don’t want to be wasting time. He’s much older and I don’t love him. But he’s nice. Respectable, strong, and smart. High-ranking,” she clarified, slurring a little. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Have another drink,” the writer suggested.

“No, I’ve had enough,” she responded. “I want to but I won’t.”

“What should you do?” he repeated. “It’s very simple. Relax. You’re young. Enjoy yourself. You want to sleep with a man—do it. You want to drink some more—do it. Be happy. Do you feel good now?”

“Yes,” she answered after thinking it over. Her drunken gravity and the gaze into nowhere of her well-fogged eyes cheered the writer up.

“That’s just great,” he said. “Hold onto that feeling. Savor your pleasure. I’m forty. I got married at twenty. I dropped out of college and got a job. I haven’t stopped ever since. I kept thinking like you. I worried about the future… I was afraid of wasting time… To hell with that. Live in the here and now and don’t be afraid of anything. Youth is given to be enjoyed.”

“Yes,” the young woman said, and she gave him a grateful look. “Ask them to bring more vodka…”

He excused himself and went out on the platform to smoke a cigarette. When he returned, one of the alpha males was leaning over his companion. Evidently he had made a vulgar suggestion. The other was waiting at their table sucking on a pale shrimp.

The writer thought ruefully that he had no chance. If, say, he smashed a bottle and jammed it into his back or shoulder… In any event, the only way to beat the square-shouldered heavyweight was by surprise and cunning. He’d never last in hand-to-hand. The young woman, however, politely and curtly rejected the solicitation, and the alpha backed off before the writer could come within striking range.

“It must be time,” she said.

He nodded and asked for the check. As they moved past the alpha males, the writer turned away, and a few seconds later thought that he shouldn’t have walked by as simply as that, and he felt a primitive vexation.

He didn’t want the girl and didn’t care whether the girl wanted him. He should have jammed something sharp into the alpha-giant’s shoulder for his own sake, not the girl’s. The writer had grown up in a small factory town and from his early youth had known that a girl sitting at someone else’s table was someone else’s girl. It didn’t matter who she was, who she came with, or who she left with. What was important was who was pouring for her at that moment. This simple thought should have been brought home to those alpha-jerks, preferably with the help of a blow to the head. But the writer didn’t strike, didn’t even throw them a look. He was afraid. He had the good sense not to look for adventure.

Good sense has a nasty aftertaste, he thought sorrowfully as he climbed up onto the top berth and turned toward the wall. When his new acquaintance returned from the bathroom and wanted to continue their conversation, the other neighbor, now awake, joined the conversation desultorily, and she started talking about love (what else?); the writer thought with relief that the girl just liked to chatter, and he fell asleep.

The hotel was a five-minute walk from the train station. The writer had stayed at this hotel a few times before, and when his wife asked him to recommend a decent place, he not only told her the address but called and reserved a room himself. The same one he usually stayed in. He reminded them that he was a steady customer and they immediately took care of everything. By all accounts, the minihotel belonged to intelligent people; the staff was good-natured, and they valued steady customers. And the writer valued those who valued him—if not as a writer, then at least as a steady customer.

A private five-room hotel, a former communal apartment in an ordinary apartment building—no, not ordinary, the real deal, a classic Petersburg building with a series of mercilessly asphalted courtyards linked by arches. Iron roofs, sprawling staircases— special twists for those in the know. Around the corner, three local cafés right there, each with its own local color: alcohol and bikers in S&M leather in one; ladies with cakes and no smoking in the next; and in the third, the food was good and cheap. Fifty paces away was Nevsky Prospect.

The damp immediately grabbed hold of his face and hands. Cold and humid; the writer was shivering even before he reached his destination.

He watched the dark, curtained windows of the room for a long time. Eight in the morning. Either she’d already run off on her affairs, which would be bad, or else she was just about to wake up and turn on the light, which would be good; then he could see the silhouettes. He could tell his wife right away by her lush, long hair. If there was someone else in the room, the writer would try to tell if it was a man or a woman. If it was somehow clear that the second lodger was a man, the writer would head back to the station and leave on the very next train.

For instance, if the room’s other guest pulled back the curtain, opened the window, and lit up.

Although his wife couldn’t stand tobacco smoke and would scarcely allow him to smoke.

Or did she love him and allow him anything?

His best friend once said, “They should love us smoking, drinking, and poor.”

When the windows lit up the writer panicked a little but quickly calmed down.

In his youth he’d done a bit of surveillance. He would get hired to find people who had borrowed money. Strange though it seems, in the early ‘90s the business of collecting debts was considered boring and not very profitable; smart people who began working on these cases switched at the first opportunity to something more interesting, like selling candies or trousers. The writer did exactly the same and subsequently recalled his street exploits without the slightest pleasure. Surveillance requires someone with an unremarkable appearance, and the writer was a skinny, mean kid; when the time came to send someone to prison, the citizen victims would have easily identified the writer.

In any case, he quickly realized he had overestimated his experience. Shapeless shadows moved behind the curtains; he watched for nearly an hour, but all he could tell was that there were two people in the room.

She had said an entire delegation, four of them, were going. The writer didn’t try to pin down the details.

The lights soon went out and a few minutes later his wife emerged. With her were two women and a man. Encouraging each other, the foursome headed toward Nevsky. The writer was standing too far away to form an opinion of the man’s appearance. Regardless, he was young, not badly dressed, and strode broadly, boldly, ahead of the three ladies.

They went on foot, the writer thought, didn’t even call a taxi; they were economizing.

He cursed softly and dove into the nearest café.

His wife liked noisy crowds. Business over, she wouldn’t go to the hotel to shorten the long evening away from home. Why should she if she was surrounded by a big, handsome city, with all its theaters and restaurants?

The writer drank his coffee and two shots of brandy. He would have to wait.

For some reason he’d thought he could simply peer in the windows, watch her coming out of the hotel or going into it— and immediately know. And if he got a look at her friends, he would know especially. He would pick up on the signals, waves, impulses. If there’s a connection between two people, the careful observer will scope it out immediately.

Now he was sitting there shivering, almost sober, and angry at himself, the way he’d been angry sometimes in his youth when two or three days of nonstop surveillance of some oaf was yielding no result, or, rather, a negative result: the oaf who’d borrowed a large sum of money was not visiting casinos and strip clubs or wearing a shiny new jacket, wasn’t chowing down at expensive restaurants, wasn’t blowing the dust off his vintage Ferrari hidden in some secret garage; he was just dragging out his sad philistine existence. What he had done with the money was unclear. He so wanted to go back to the client paying for the surveillance and say, “I’ve got it! He’s living a double life! He’s secretly building his own brick factory…”

At the time the writer was twenty-two and hadn’t written anything yet, but his writerly imagination was already playing nasty jokes on him.

He thought people lived interesting, vivid, stormy, full lives. Whereas they actually lived boring, languid ones.

He didn’t believe it. He spent fifteen years trying to find people who lived interesting lives and as a result discovered that the most interesting person he’d met in a decade and a half of continuous searching was himself.

Downing another shot, he turned his anger on his wife now, not himself. Had she bounced out of the hotel doors, beaming and laughing, wearing heels and expensive stones, arm in arm with someone powerful with square shoulders and white teeth, then he, her husband, would have felt pain but also admiration. This way, all he felt was irritation. Once again, nothing was happening. Once again, nothing was clear. Only shadows behind curtains, only vague suspicions.

He ate very slowly, and killed nearly an hour and a half. Killing time is a great sin, but sometimes a murderer simply has no other option.

He came out on Nevsky and was going to start wandering around, gawking like a Western tourist at the ponderous granite façades, but all of a sudden he got scared he might run into his wife by accident; he turned onto a side street and hid in the first bar he came to.

The city was gray, chilly, and indifferent, created not for people but for the sake of a great idea, though there were plenty of establishments for every taste and pocketbook. As a small boy, the writer had come here twice with his parents—to visit the museums and soak up some culture—and even then he’d noticed the abundance of cafés and snack bars. In answer to his question, his mother had shrugged and said, “They lived through the blockade. People starved to death. The fear of famine must have etched itself into their memory forever. They’re led by fear. It makes them open little restaurants in every suitable half-cellar…”

Even then, actually, the writer thought the people of the city lacked all fear. Constructed of massive stone, the city felt solid. And now, thirty years later, the local residents resembled calm Europeans; naturally, it wasn’t fear that had compelled them to create so many restaurants and bars but healthy Baltic hospitality.

The writer pulled out his laptop, but he didn’t turn it on. His vexation had the better of him. There was no possibility of actually working. It was stupid. Very stupid. A jealous man had come to follow his wife but had taken along his computer so as not to waste time. Stupid, bizarre, and ridiculous. That’s how jealous men always behave.

Go to hell, he told himself. Jealous men are all different and they behave in different ways. Are you such a specialist in jealousy? You aren’t jealous at all. You just want to know. You think it’s important to know whether anything happened or not. The very fact…

The bar was stuffy and bleak. It had begun to rain outside. People quickly packed the narrow space and the writer found himself trapped. He could get up and leave—outside it was cold and windy. If you didn’t find a nicer place you’d come back and your table’d be taken. He could stay—and breathe the sour smells and listen to Finnish, German, and English. The writer didn’t know any other languages and was now ashamed of his lack of education.

He asked for another dose of brandy and decided to relax.

It was easy. The writer never forgot that he’d been created, begat, by cheap, smoke-filled dives just like this. He’d spent half his conscious life in smoky, dim establishments where customers from the lower-middle class went to unwind in the evening. He’d eaten, worked, and held meetings in smoke and liquor fumes. He’d smoked a lot. And drank; sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. He’d always eaten very little. And written a lot.

At some point—it might have been three years ago—he realized his wife was tired of that life. She didn’t understand him. She’d ask him to go to Rome, Prague, Barcelona. He’d agree, but a couple of days into their stay in any European capital he would find a smoke-filled dive, and once he had, he would calm down. And when he had calmed down, he would realize that European dives were much more boring than Russian dives.

The rain stopped and he stepped out under the low sky.

He was considered an interesting man, and his books were full of interesting stories. Only his wife knew that in fact the writer was a taciturn, boring creature and all his entertainment boiled down to television. He drew his plots from his salad days; so much had happened that now he could write his whole life without getting distracted by anything else. But his wife grew weary, and one day he realized she had another man.

Not realized—suspected.

Surveillance requires a car. When dark fell, the writer hailed a cab. Finding himself in an oddly clean car, he asked whether he might smoke. “As you wish,” the driver replied in an even voice; it was immediately clear that this guy would not do for today’s purposes. The writer had to laugh. Usually cab drivers irritated him with their informality, dirty sock smell, and rudimentary musical tastes, but here was rare good luck—behind the wheel was a true intellectual. And so? That’s not what he needed. He needed your typical rogue, a worker reeking of gasoline. A proletarian of the pedals. It’s always that way with intellectuals, the writer thought. They always show up at the wrong time.

He asked to be let off at the corner of Nevsky and Marat. After paying he realized he had to reallocate his money. He took a few bills out of his wad and put those in his pants pocket and the rest in his jacket, next to his heart. Laughing at himself, he crossed the street and caught another cab, this time quite successfully. The cabbie was young and smirky and looked like a lazy scoundrel. The writer liked scoundrels, he’d spent many years among scoundrels and knew how to behave in their society. He showed his money and explained what he needed to do. The cabbie’s gray eye and gold tooth flashed gamely. He was taking no risk. Better to stand around than drive. Better to do nothing than something. Naturally, given a previously agreed upon payment; money up front.

They idled across the street where they could see both the room windows and the hotel entrance. The wait could take hours; the writer relaxed and lowered his seat back slightly.

Bored, the cabbie inevitably struck up the usual, fairly pointless conversation, but the writer immediately interrupted him and started talking himself, and it was a monologue. He had long known that you could calm any idle chatterer if you immediately sucked up all the air. And forced him to listen to you. The writer had a few monologues at the ready, each of which could be made to last as long as needed. The total corruption, war, gas prices in Europe and Asia, weapons, prison, the outrages of traffic cops, air travel, games of chance, cars and motorcycles. Once I was in Barcelona; and once I was in Amsterdam. Generalities were not advisable—the chatterer would interrupt you right away. You needed concrete stories fashioned in keeping with the rules of dramaturgy, with a beginning, middle, and end. Mentions of large sums of money go down well. One time, there I was giving someone fifty thousand German marks—that was before the euro came in—and the man arrived for the meeting with a rubber belt under his shirt to hide his riches on his person, and he was amazed when he saw a thin stack instead of lots of raggedy bills; he didn’t know there were thousand-mark bills… And so on. The stories leapt out of the writer by themselves, one led to another, the episodes were recast in decisive criminal slang, rough curses, and minimal gestures.

Thus passed nearly four hours. The driver was tired— chatterers don’t know how to listen—and had smoked all the cigarettes the man had given him. And then the writer saw his wife.

Basically, the earlier arrangement was repeated, only in reverse. First, in lively conversation and even with little explosions of carefree laughter, the three persons of the female persuasion passed by; the male person, by now tieless, coat flapping open, was bringing up the rear of the procession. His left arm dragged a solidly filled package bearing the logo of a cheap supermarket. Tensing, the writer managed to make out his perfectly ordinary face in the light of the streetlamp. The heavy cheeks of a thirty-year-old not inclined to adventures, moderately charming, inoffensive. The writer managed to glimpse the gentleman checking out his female companions’ figures. He’s choosing, the writer thought angrily. Three of them, one of him, and the whole night ahead… But if it’s her and him, that’s a disaster. He’s boring. He has boring hair, boring ears, boring boots. What’s he got in that package? Kefir?

The windows lit up, and again vague shadowy patches began to move behind the curtains. The writer got out. After the stuffy car the air seemed prickly and sweet. He took out his phone and called.

“Everything’s fine,” his wife said matter-of-factly. “I just got back, I’m tired, and I’m going to bed. What are you doing?”

They lobbed a number of everyday questions and answers at each other and said goodbye. The writer paced back and forth. A car passing through a puddle gave him a good, stiff splashing.

The light in the room went out, and the curtains were lit up blue from the inside. She’d turned on the television, the writer realized. Or had she? A television masks noise well. For instance, in prison, if you had to break some idiot’s bones, first you turned up the volume on the television and only then called the idiot in for a chat.

Who is the idiot now? the writer asked himself. Me, naturally.On the other side of that wall, in their room, they’re watching television. They have a blanket, pillows, and tea. Maybe even wine. Actually, his wife barely drank. Whereas I have a heavy sky, icy damp creeping under my collar, and next to me a greedy fool with yellow nails on his short fingers.

The light went out, eleven o’clock—what should he do? Where should he go? Tomorrow afternoon she’d return home. He hadn’t seen, hadn’t understood anything.

He went back to the car and immediately caught a familiar whiff that called up a number of the most varied associations. The driver was looking in his direction.

“I could go for a joint myself,” the writer declared. “Got anything?”

“Not on me.”

They quickly came to an agreement and drove off. In the process of making the deal they’d had to find out something about each other. The driver’s name was Peter.

“Bear in mind, I’m not the pusher,” Peter warned. “But I can introduce you. It’s nearby. Liteyny Prospect.”

The apartment—huge, in an old building—turned out to be something between a squat and a lair. The young guy who led the guests in looked like Jesus gone to drink. A lump of gray ash hung in his beard. While the writer was considering whether to take off his boots, a petite young woman in an alcoholic’s tank top and outsize camo pants emerged from the depths of a dark hallway on her way to the kitchen, holding onto the wall, which was covered with pieces of different-colored paper instead of wallpaper; her left arm was adorned with a badly wrapped gray bandage. The writer decided to keep his boots on.

Entering this place, the driver was subtly transformed and became both looser and cruder. He curtly reproached Jesus for being hammered again and looked at the girl with undisguised hatred. The writer picked up on this immediately and tensed. He himself had not experienced hatred for many years and hoped never to experience it again.

“For you,” Peter told Jesus, and he nodded at the writer, who straightened the strap on his backpack, making it clear he was a guest, a stranger, he’d come on business and would leave right away, as soon as he got what he needed.

“Follow me,” Jesus responded in English, and he smiled at the writer and stepped into the hallway’s dimness. He moved slowly and smoothly. He threw back a blanket covered in large fuchsia flowers that served as a door and led the writer and driver into a room hung solid with watercolors of flowers, eyes, and clouds in various combinations and even symbioses: some flowers had pupils and lashes, while the clouds looked like blossoms with partly opened petals. The illustrator didn’t have much talent but was obviously a very passionate creature, and the writer chuckled to himself; he himself wrote books that had passion but not much talent.

“I’m not the pusher,” Peter repeated, flashing his tooth. “Talk to him.” And he pointed to Jesus.

Jesus smiled again, calmly and shyly.

The writer didn’t like dealers; he silently pulled out a large bill and set it on the edge of the table, which was covered with dirty glasses and cups. Jesus nodded and left the room.

“This is my pad,” Peter announced carelessly, moving the clothes off the couch and taking a seat. “Well, nearly mine. Two rooms out of five. My granny dies, I’ll have three rooms. Some businessman already bought the other two. Granny dies, I’ll sell him the third. My sister and I’ll be left with a room apiece. We’ll split the money”—he snapped his fingers—”and I’ll buy a boat. In the summer I’ll take tourists around, and in the winter I’ll go where it’s warm. Rostov, Sochi…” He fell silent, then added, “But Granny isn’t dying.”

“That’s all right,” the writer said. “She will.”

Jesus came back and set a baggie on the table with a delicate motion. “Hydroponic,” he explained quietly. “Organic, made in the European Union.”

The writer opened the baggie, sniffed, and handed it back to Jesus.

“Fire one up. Let’s see about this European Union.”

Jesus shrugged; the motion was brief and helplessly bohemian. Great dealer I’ve got me, the writer thought contemptuously, but then he glanced at the psychedelic watercolors and decided not to judge the stranger. There are a hundred reasons why a talented young man suddenly drops from the level of artist to drug dealer. Don’t judge, the writer repeated to himself, accepting the joint from Jesus’s dirty fingers. Don’t even try.

He pulled the smoke into his lungs, making sure not to produce a coughing fit. He handed it to Peter, who took it readily.

Suddenly, on the other side of the wall, they heard the crash of something breaking, something small and solid, like a sugar bowl or cut glass; Peter whispered a curse, entrusted the joint to Jesus, and went out.

“Yours?” the writer asked, nodding at the watercolors.

“Hers,” Jesus replied. “I work in oils.”

There were muffled cries. Jesus neatly placed the roach on the edge of the table and headed for the sound of the scuffle. The writer started to wonder whether he ought to remain alone in the room or put his buy in his pocket and retreat, dispensing with formalities; or, on the contrary, was the right thing to wait for Jesus’s return and close the deal and only then clear out? At that moment he understood that his doubts—excessively philosophical—were the result of the marijuana’s effect and that the drug itself, naturally, had to be left right here. And he had to disappear immediately.

He finished off the joint in two drags, threw his backpack over his shoulders, and made tracks.

Through the kitchen door he saw Peter sitting on the floor; he was holding his side with one hand and examining his other— bloody—hand. Jesus was standing over him scratching his greasy head. The girl, her legs tucked under her on the stool and her face covered with her open palms, was moaning softly and peeking out through her fingers wild-eyed. Right there on the floor, in a pile of white shards, lay a paring knife.

The writer walked up to it and bent over.

“Where are you going?” Peter asked, turning swiftly pale.

He’s about to pass out, the writer thought. I’m sure they don’t have smelling salts. If I slap him they won’t understand. Especially the girl. She’ll immediately think I’m starting a fight…

He sat down, took Peter by the shoulders, and cautiously lay him on the floor. He pulled the driver’s shirt out of his pants and turned it up—after that came a dirty undershirt and below that a shallow cut.

The wounded man was emitting muffled groans and cursing incoherently. The writer looked at Jesus and said, “A cut. Nothing serious. You can stitch it up right here. Or take him to an emergency room. But bear in mind—it’s a knife wound and the doctors might call the cops…”

“I hope he croaks!” the girl hollered, squeezing her knees to her chest.

“Your decision,” the writer said, shifting his gaze from Jesus to Peter.

“Well…” Jesus said. “I don’t know… Are you a doctor?”

“Nearly,” the writer answered, taking off his pack. “Bring vodka, a clean cloth, and a needle and thread. Quickly.”

“I hope he croaks, the bastard!” the girl shouted.

Jesus went into the hallway.

In principle, it doesn’t have to be sewn, the writer thought. It could be cauterized. But he would scream.

“Sit,” he ordered Peter. “And undress. It’s nothing, a scratch.”

“Did it nick my liver?” the wounded man rasped.

“Your liver’s on the other side,” the writer said. “Come on, off with it.”

Peter slowly raised his hands and with clumsy fingers started unbuttoning.

Jesus came back and held out a sewing needle and towel. “There isn’t any thread.”

“Pull some out of something.”

The author of psychedelic watercolors looked at him uncomprehendingly. The writer told him to undress the victim. He went out into the hallway, quickly studied the garments hanging on the coat rack, found an old coat with a shabby fur collar—obviously belonging to the old woman who didn’t want to die—and neatly pulled threads from the lining. The thread was rotten, but folded twice it would do just fine.

There was no vodka to be found either, but there was brandy. The writer told Jesus to calm the girl and neatly closed the wound with two stitches. Peter—he had a gray body with thick rolls of fat at his waist—moaned faintly and writhed.

The writer poured half the bottle into Peter’s mouth and half on his bare flesh. He wanted a sip himself, but judging from the smell, the brandy was some wretched fake.

The girl spoiled the operation’s conclusion. Breaking out of Jesus’s weak arms, she leapt up—the shards crunching—and tried to kick the wounded man. He bared his teeth and floridly promised his attacker a speedy and agonizing death.

The writer stood up.

Peter means stone, he remembered.

He found the bathroom at the end of the hall. He liked it—large, good acoustics, a window with a broad sill. The writer thought that it would be nice to immerse himself in water here on a warm summer’s day, say, up to his chest, and turn his wet face and shoulders to the fresh street breeze.

He washed the blood off his hands and carefully examined his fingers and nails. He could only hope the wounded man didn’t have hepatitis or something similar. He looked at himself in the mirror. Suddenly he felt a chill. The adrenaline’s washed out, he thought. Or the drug’s kicking in. In Moscow they sell southern grass, from Kazakhstan or Tajikistan, but here it’s the north, Europe; damn if I know where they get it. Maybe it really is from Holland. Or they grow it themselves…

He buttoned his jacket as he walked, now in the hallway; he checked his pockets. He turned by the door. Peter was leaning against the wall, and Jesus was stroking the sobbing girl’s head. A thin blue flame was burning peacefully under the iron kettle.

“Go to the pharmacy,” the writer said as he turned the door handle. “Buy a bandage. And antibiotics. Bandage him up.”

“Fuck yourself!” the girl shouted, pushing Jesus away and rolling her eyes, white with rage.

The writer nodded in agreement. The advice was perfectly sensible.

On the stairs he checked his pockets and the contents of his backpack one more time; his money and documents were where they were supposed to be.

Barely a drop, he thought, letting go of the massive door and plunging into the rain.

The wind was strolling down Liteyny Prospect. The streetcar rails glinted like dagger blades. The writer remembered the paring knife among the china shards. It was a foolish shiv, no good for killing or even seriously injuring someone. He saw the lit windows of the twenty-four-hour store and headed for that.

He didn’t like to warm up with alcohol. He considered the method lowbrow. But sometimes, in lowbrow circumstances, lowbrow acts were exactly what he needed. The writer bought a flask of whiskey, raked the change, a few coins (he had never respected copper money), into his palm, turned into the very first entryway, and downed half.

If you were a real, old-school writer, he told himself, you’d find an open bar now, perch at a table, and get down to work. Right now, at three in the morning, when your hands still smell of someone else’s blood, not an enemy’s, but the blood of some random clown, some philistine who doesn’t matter. When your head’s filled with marijuana smoke and your mouth with the taste of fake Polish whiskey. When icy drops are rolling down your neck and back. And you wouldn’t write about the cold and graveyard damp. Or about fools, jealousy, greed, and poverty. You’d fill your story with sunshine and the scent of tropical flowers. Salty ocean breezes would fly at your heroes’ tanned faces. They would love each other and die young.

He set out, feeling a surge of strength. He knew for sure that if he found an open bar he would do what others had done before him. Sit down and write. Moreover, if he didn’t find an appropriate establishment he’d grab a ride to the train station—or even walk—buy a ticket for the first morning train, and then find somewhere to sit in the waiting room and write anyway.

He couldn’t come here and not write anything.

This city consisted of black water and black stone. The water below, in the canals and rivers, and above, in the air.

Walking, he caught himself feeling as though he were breathing water.

The local inhabitants could probably use gills; especially now, in late fall. Or special breathing organs made of stone. Granite alveoli and tracheae.

The writer liked to fantasize after he got out of scrapes. He found contemplating abstract topics gave him a sensation of the fullness of life and was very calming.

His best friend once said, “Don’t look for peace, let peace find you.”

He walked to the station without finding a single open establishment.

Entering the warm, booming hall, he immediately felt a weakness. He no longer had any desire to work.

He bought a ticket. The cashier yawned mightily and glanced at his sleeve. The writer stepped aside and looked—there was someone else’s blood on his cuff.

Then he sat down on the plastic bench and composed a brief story about someone who loved people but not himself.

Twelve hours later he was home. That same evening his wife arrived, and the writer caught himself thinking that he was sincerely glad to see her.

The shirt he’d had to throw away; the blood wouldn’t wash out.

SWIFT CURRENT by Anna Solovey Kolomna ^{Translated by Marian Schwartz}

I ’m not getting ready to die… This ridiculous plastic thing gets tossed too—who gives that to a little girl?… I’m not getting ready to die, that would be a waste of time. I’m moving. Very soon. Where, I don’t know yet, but there’s no staying here. Why would I do that? And don’t look at me like that from the wall. If only you could see… Hey, what is it with these photographs? Whoever invented photography ought to be shot… There’s one more sheet on the sofa, the last one, the rest are neatly folded and stacked. I’m moving and I don’t need anything now—when you don’t have it, you do without. There’s a kettle and a glass, so drink!

“Before, love sucked up all the air and I never did move anywhere. All those nights we fought and it always won, fell on me with its heavy, slippery body, its damp fog crushing me, squeezing my heart so hard it could scarcely beat, my breathing shallow, and until I smeared into a white cloud under its carcass, it wouldn’t stop making love… and it always said, I love you because you want to die. Anyone who says it’s chilly and youthful and its eyes are the color of a wave has never fought with it in bed. This city—Peter’s creation—always was the victor, smothering me with its embraces, so by morning I’d be brimming with the fatal poison of his seed.

“In the mornings, as I was walking across the Kryukov Canal to Theater Square, it would gradually reveal itself, like a vision, the cupolas of the St. Nicholas Cathedral piercing the gray fog. It would pretend we were strangers and just tickle me with its quivering air, flirting with everyone at once, the cheap stud! As if I weren’t the one who’d carried all its countless embryo-germs in my womb, as if I hadn’t coughed through its winters trying to spit them out. I crossed that little bridge on countless occasions, and each time admiration stopped me dead in my tracks, and I forgot all the darkness and reveled in the blue.

“But then I slipped away… I ran and ran… and I stuck out my tongue, teasing them!… I don’t go there anymore. But every day I try to describe… Here’s this stack of papers, I packed everything away in my chest and wrote for days and days, sometimes even at night. There’s heat coming from the tips of my fingers, and that heat gets transferred into the letters, my soul drains into the ink. I don’t like computers, I’m made of other blood, loftier blood, and my handwriting is like runes… open the chest and hocus-pocus—an empty chest, yes… because I had to condemn the words to fire for them to fly. It was because of the fire that they locked me up, my neighbors. Fire can burn everyone. That’s clear, that the fire burning inside can burn everyone. They decided I was crazy and rejoiced. Rejoiced that my room would free up sooner. They don’t have far to take me. Pryazhka’s a stone’s throw from here. A cheerful trick. They’re good neighbors, not mean. And you can see they’re poor. Who else lives communally now? They don’t have a car either. It’s enough to make you cry. Their boy sits on the steps with his friends all the time smoking weed. Could you really invite a girl up to an apartment like that? Poor people, their hearts seethe and have nowhere to bubble over. They themselves left, and shut me out, in case I burned the building down, set fire to it. They think they’ll be living in my room. Fools, fools, I have Mashenka… she’s not here now, but if anything happened to me she’d hop right to it and come running, my darling.”

Mashenka was walking across the bridge. Plié, plié! Knees out. Jeté forward, assemblé to the side! Rond de jambe, plié, extend! Fondu sur les demi-pointes! Your back!

What was the point? She hadn’t been there very long, but she still couldn’t get the words out of her head. Her heart started beating fast, though why should it, really? The Vaganova school… her dream… all that time not eating, not drinking, training until she dropped, leg cramps, and her ardent daily prayer to her home icons: Ulanova, Pavlova, Nijinsky, Lopatkina… and then—ta-da!—the envelope, please. The letters make it simple and clear: corps de ballet. Chin to chin, nose to nose, left-right, fire—dive, little soldier…

Masha was still foggy about what would happen to her afterward; she had dreamed only of victory. Roses by the basket and admiration. So there’d be none of that? She didn’t care if she had to slave twenty-four hours a day, didn’t care if everyone in the theater hated her, didn’t care if there was blood in her shoes every day, that didn’t scare her. What did? Being like everyone else, going around in Turkish sweats like everyone else, talking about television, trembling to save up for an apartment in Kupchino with her beer-swilling old man. Then going to a job her whole life, coming back in the evening, choosing wallpaper, hanging lights, closing the doors on people coming off the streets so the lobby wouldn’t stink, doing homework with her children, occasionally breaking free and going abroad to stroll in a crowd. What for? She hated all that, hated it. After all, times had changed. Anything was possible! Leave and find a job dancing? They would appreciate her there! But where? In a strip joint? Or one of those classical-cabaret kind of ballets that does The Birch Tree? Wait for some fat sugar daddy to make her his mistress? But she’d dreamed of creating a world of beauty around herself; she loved art, the audience, and she loved a city—Petersburg. She didn’t care if it was dark there nearly year-round. Its lights lit at night, its golden spires aimed for the heavens, the festive crowd on Nevsky, the Hermitage, architect Rossi’s street—their names alone made it worthwhile!

She found being ridiculous humiliating. She bathed for an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening, washing away the dirt, transforming herself into a pure angel twice a day. Because of the washing, she moved out of the ballet dorm and in with her aunt almost immediately. You can’t bathe for two hours a day in a dorm, and anyway she was afraid of being on her own while still so young. Her aunt and uncle loved her as if she were their own, and she even called her aunt Mama. Only they tried too hard to feed her, always pushing fish oil on her, and this irritated Mashenka. She struggled mightily over each extra bite.

Of course, Masha idolized the ballet, but not to the point of oblivion, not to the point that she could stand in a single line her entire life. And who said you could hang on in the first row? You’d be trampled there too. Proud but poor—that’s the only way for primas—your success is your applause, your seething blood, your power over the audience.

Mashenka seemed to wilt utterly. She walked around in a funk, and if you called out to her she didn’t call back. She was used to working hard, and she expected recognition for that, her teachers had praised her for that, and now everyone had betrayed her, she had no one to count on, and only she herself knew how special she was and that she definitely had not come into this world for the corps de ballet. The others, anyone who didn’t understand this, became her enemy. She threw the portraits of her idols in the garbage. Masha raked her aunt’s collection of porcelain ballerinas off the shelf and hid them under a pile of linens. Her aunt bit her tongue, but she wept all night with pity for the girl. She and her husband loved their niece very much, but they had not discerned her morbid pride and did not worship her great talent, so she found their consolation utterly banal. Masha’s aunt had herself been a musician. She taught at the conservatory and played violin in an orchestra. She’d never aspired to being a soloist, but then she wasn’t wracked by a passion like Masha’s, or perhaps she’d left it behind, somewhere in her past. This weakness stirred Masha’s contempt. What could you explain to a spineless jellyfish? That was why Masha was sweet and polite with her relatives but kept them at arm’s length. She danced in her corps de ballet and took sedatives after each performance to ward off hysterics—yes, after the performance, because the applause took the worst toll: the harsh pounding of hundreds of palms that had nothing to do with her, the unlucky, persecuted ballerina…

The pills helped. Little by little she began making kopeks on the side writing about ballet and fashion for a magazine. Because she had a head, as well as legs up to her ears. Then suddenly things started going well for her, swimmingly, marvelously. She started getting invitations to receptions with stars, designers, and directors, but she wasn’t making enough money to dress for them. She couldn’t make that kind of money at the magazine, of course—there weren’t enough fees in the world for her to go to a dressmaker. Somehow certain fine gentlemen just approached her and suggested that she might do well to write a letter and expose the unsightly truth about their prima ballerina, and they also asked Masha to stop by the makeup room for a moment while the star was working onstage.

These services, which made trouble for their prima, fetched decent money. But Masha was willing even for free. This prima was a shrew, and she’d been seducing other women’s husbands! Her stage triumphs weren’t enough—no, she had to get her grubby paws on it all! They should be punished, people like that, which was why Masha had no regrets or remorse.

Also at that time she had an unusual romance, something she had waited for for a long time. Only she’d pictured it rather differently. She’d thought she would come down off her cloud for this love and allow him to kiss her knee, but the reality was otherwise. It didn’t matter, though. This happiness’s name was Vsevolod—Seva—and he was a somebody. He didn’t just have money and connections, he didn’t just have power, he had all three, and he was a celebrity in the city and beyond. He was respected—not that he blew his own horn. Seva could do a lot, a whole lot, almost anything, and it was he, a man like this, who was inspired at first glance, who immediately “got” Masha—that she was special, one of a kind—and he promised the world would soon know it too. You shouldn’t be so afraid of the corps de ballet. It’s a start, a jumping-off point, and with him she would become a golden girl, a sovereign over men’s minds, and looking at all this riffraff, these ballet stars, would be like looking at charwomen, at the staff, but Masha still had to select a field of endeavor.

Seva began taking her to serious gatherings and introducing her to the powerful of this world. He gave her some valuable stones, so she would look more confident. Masha calmed down and left the theater—and sat down to her books, feeling she lacked education. To distract her, Seva let her dabble in power—run charitable balls and various formal ceremonies. People sought her advice, flattered her, and she started feeling her lack of money, which she needed, of course, to keep up appearances. She wasn’t some errand girl who could feel comfortable in sweats with pimples on her nose. Since she and Seva still maintained separate households, she didn’t think she could ask him for money. And Seva seemed not to notice that creating an image—stylish, festive, elegant, and at the same time with the most maidenly innocence and a light transparency to her face— meant hard work, hard work every day. And money.

She’d not stopped writing since she discovered she had this talent. Her range of topics had expanded and now touched on business and politics, though all that was of little interest to her personally. But when Seva’s people suggested what might be good to write about, she did it without a second thought. She interviewed one public figure and they had a marvelous chat. A witty fellow, what was his name? Dima… true, he dressed kind of like a tramp. Then Seva told her to make an appointment with this Dima so they could go over the interview together. It could have been sent by e-mail, of course, but Dima didn’t refuse to meet. Why shouldn’t he hang out one more time with a girl like Masha? They set a time and place, and then Seva said, “Don’t go.” And she didn’t, of course, and Dima was accidentally run down right where they’d agreed to meet. And killed. Run over totally by accident. She didn’t know and had no desire to know these affairs of Seva’s. And that Dima shouldn’t have poked his nose where it didn’t belong… The main thing was, why? They were just making publicity for themselves, but they made it seem like they were so honest, fighters for justice… it was sickening… He took her by the arm then, and laughed: “You’re an odalisque, not a journalist…” And for a moment she actually wished he’d put his arms around her, but Masha paid no attention to that, or rather, she was able to pay no attention to that because she had an iron will and discipline.

She didn’t want to think about death. Later, someday later, she’d decide what she felt about it. Even when her mama died she hadn’t reflected on mortality. She simply forgot it all instantly, as if nothing had ever happened. That was when her distant relatives sent her to ballet school. The girl had been saying since she was five that she was going to be a ballerina, but her mother wouldn’t hear of it, and now her mother was gone, so why not? She boarded the train and was off, especially since her aunt, her mama’s sister, lived in magical Petersburg. And at school Masha had hard work to do, and she had to survive among strangers. And survive she did. She even pulled off that whole business with the corps de ballet. Only because heaven sent her a miracle. Sent her Seva—a gentle, smart, kind, courageous warrior who feared no enemy. And who believed in her.

Only why wasn’t he here yet?

All of a sudden she remembered and actually staggered. How could she have forgotten? Well, yes, she could have because yesterday it was said through laughter and drunken eyes… The girls from the theater all lied, they were insanely jealous, but yesterday they dropped blatant hints that he’d found some other dancer—some corps de ballet louse, a pale moth… with freckles to boot… third in the back row… What if it were true? Was her life ruined? My God, oh my God… though why, why was she getting herself so wound up, why was she blowing things out of proportion?

Masha grabbed the railing of the bridge and jerked her hand back—cold, nasty metal. Just as she loved to touch granite, she hated metal. Her hands would smell of it for hours.

The round lamps lit up and shone on the turbid, swirling water. Here it was, the canal’s icy ripple. Only now it was summer and it was still icy… A pleasure boat rammed through the water and the laughing, tipsy tourists waved to her. Masha turned away. Why did Seva want to meet here? Now she had to jut up on the street like a column, to the amusement of the rare passersby. On one side of the Kryukov Canal loomed the Mariinsky; on the other, a ridiculous construction site that in the uncertain future was supposed to be the theater’s second hall. When the Mariinsky was still her theater, she’d waited anxiously for what would happen when they moved to the new building and renovations began in the old. Day after day she’d watched them clear the ground for the new one and wreck the First Five-Year Plan Palace of Culture, a fairly dismal example of Stalinist empire style. For a while, like a graphic illustration of the empire’s fall, only the huge czarist columns rising out of the mountain of wreckage and debris were left standing. Masha imagined that before she knew it they would be putting in stone benches here, like an amphitheater, and instead of actors they would bring in captive gladiators—and the new theater would be ready. But they dynamited the columns, razed a couple of other old buildings, and for a long time the construction didn’t even begin; they probably hadn’t been able to find the money. Still, in that time, the time of Masha’s maturation, an eternity passed! The building put some meat on its bones and was gradually transformed into a boring concrete box with the bare ribs of its framework poking out indecently. Instead of captive gladiators, migrant workers showed up and scurried from floor to floor like ants from morning until night. And now, despite the late hour, the figure of some detained construction worker stuck up in a window. He might be sleeping right here. He might have nowhere else to go.

People just keep coming, as if the city is totally elastic, so you can’t walk calmly down the street anymore, Masha thought with irritation.

But if you hire someone like that, you don’t have to pay him a lot, and when this moth leaves the theater he’ll push her off the bridge and no one will notice… What thoughts! What evil thoughts! But it was true, no one would see. At night… but he’s just the kind you shouldn’t get mixed up with… he’d spill the beans. But if this young lady were to walk up… She rented an apartment a little ways down, on Masterskaya… maybe she just rented a bed, not an apartment… and if no one were around then, Masha herself could ask her for a light… Oh, what nonsense. After all, if the girl were pushed, she would cry out… and then—stop. After all, Masha didn’t know for a fact whether Seva had anything going on with her. Insanity, that’s what passions lead to. She closed her eyes and thought she could see that pale freckled vixen go flying into the cold water—a split second, and that would be the end of her.

Masha leaned slightly over the railing. Why, it was so low… No mesh whatsoever, just two crossbars… Yes, yes, my life is ruined… Take Dima, for example. Where is that Dima now? Before him there’d been someone else, Sergei Pavlovich. She’d forgotten all about him until now, all of a sudden… She wrote something about him on Seva’s orders, back at the very beginning, when they’d just met, and that Sergei Pavlovich—no, Konstantinovich, definitely Konstantinovich, like her prodigal father—jumped out a window… Enough! If she didn’t go to-morrow and get a decent pedicure and if she couldn’t pay Lastochka for her hair, then she couldn’t go on living. She had to find a way out somehow. Lastochka charged so much now. The nerve of her! On the other hand, you weren’t going to find anyone better… Seva had no idea how she put herself together every day, starting early in the morning, her weekly purchases were expensive—or did he think she washed her hair with rosemary and covered her hands with sunflower oil?

She’d promised to stop by her aunt’s a month ago, but no, she wouldn’t go. Those visits sunk her into an awful depression, she felt like hanging herself, and then it took so much time, and Masha didn’t have any money for the psychologist now. The psychologist would squeeze her dry. Her aunt could sit there alone and fancy herself a widowed duchess. When Uncle Pasha died, she’d exchanged the apartment at the favorite niece’s wish. Masha got a room, which she now rented out, while she herself rented a decent separate space, and her aunt got a room too. It was her own fault for ending up in a housing project. Masha had tried to talk her aunt into agreeing to an apartment outside town, where she would have fresh air to breathe and could lead a circle at the club. They were easing her out of her job anyway. No, she clung to her city, but why? Here, they wouldn’t even let her pick up her instrument; her neighbors immediately started making a fuss.

Masha found all this depressing. No, nothing like that was going to happen to her. She would age beautifully, maybe have a child—one—not that she was particularly eager, but men needed that… Why wasn’t he here? Where was Seva!

Maybe he was with that mangy vixen and had forgotten about her altogether. Lord, my God, my heart’s really beating… No, I can’t leave it like this.

“Look, there’s water coming in under the door. They shut me in but forgot to turn off the tap. There wasn’t any hot water for a couple of weeks so the taps were all left open. But if I’m not going where my Masha is now, where the rivers meet, what’s the big surprise if the water’s running like this, flowing like hot blood, turbulent, and the little boats darting this way and that through it, like the needles in the neighbor boy’s veins, the needles he pokes into himself in the kitchen, thinking I don’t notice. I wanted to ask him, but I was scared of frightening him. What do I need a needle for? What about lighting this airshaft—what if it lit up all of a sudden? Somewhere where there’s no light at all, just a wolfish-gray longing… This is how I dreamed of hell: I’m sitting in a deep but narrow hole looking up the whole time, at a dim light very high up… but I’ll never get there. Never.

“Dreams are the only reason I’m still moving, because I started having terrible dreams. Once I dreamed I was in a well, not an airshaft like this one, but a real well, only without water, and up above vampires were reaching for me with their long feelers. But I’m not afraid. I know if I start playing it will all pass, but the neighbors say it’s too loud. I could now—no one’s there… but today I actually shouldn’t play. Under no circumstances should I, since someone else is already playing, and playing beautifully. I just don’t know who… somewhere, up above…

“The water is flowing and flowing, nonstop. Oh well, if I’m not going where the rivers meet, it will play a trick—a cheap trick!—and arrange a trap, so that it can always play cat-and-mouse with me—-catch and release… catch and release.”

Vsevolod parked his car rather far away. He was walking in no hurry, though he was late for his date with Masha. A real piece of work, but a foolish piece of work; a useful piece of work, but a stultifying piece of work. To tell the truth, he’d been attracted to dancers practically since he was a kid, but the kind without ambitions. He didn’t care for ballet stars and never went after the big names. A no-name little ballet girl—that was as good as it got, that’s how he’d come across Masha. Long neck and big eyes, she bat her eyelashes and caught his every word; she was always hungry. She was afraid of making any unnecessary movement, so as not to disgrace herself. After all, she came from the sticks to live with her aunt at someone else’s expense. She called her aunt “Mama” and her uncle “Papa” because she had no mother and she’d only seen her father a couple of times in her life. As skittish as a hare, and she did everything without a murmur, no matter how you posed her. He took full advantage of that—lying, standing, upside down.

She turned out to be useful in other ways too. She turned out to have a brain she could flex when she needed to, and could bare her teeth at strangers, show some muscle, protect her master, and he appreciated that. On the one hand, he liked it… but on the other, it had started to bother him. Lately Vsevolod had sensed his babe was having quite a hard time—he guessed her time had come for nest building. He knew those tricks of theirs, and for Masha he was prepared to put up with a lot. Maybe he should give her, oh, thirty thousand bucks. That would be quite a lot for her, and he wouldn’t feel it, he could bring more. He could, but there was no point spoiling her, so… for starters, he had to come to his senses. He could keep her longer, he’d grown used to her, but there was one new circumstance… this gentle eighteen-year-old circumstance… and Masha… she wouldn’t understand, though she should… she could have caught on by now: let him, Seva, get away with stuff and accept the world as it was. He wondered what she’d do without him.

Right then Seva got a stab in his side. It was his matchless, famed intuition talking to him. She knew an awful lot, and no good could come of an injured woman, especially Masha, who was something special. You couldn’t buy her off. She needed something else… He could pawn her off on someone else… someone good—that was something they did too, but with her, that trick wouldn’t work, she’d get even nastier… but so what? What about wiping her out? The concept appealed to him: wipe off the face of the earth, from memory, as if she never existed and everything was starting fresh, and no one had ever set foot there before… Wipe her out. This thought didn’t surprise Seva. It was as if he’d been expecting it. He started tallying up his material and moral loss in the one case or the other—if he wiped Masha out or left her walking the earth.

Seva was an old campaigner. He’d started his career small, gone through fire and ice at the very peak of gangsterism, and now he lived peacefully and quietly, or so it seemed. He came from a civilized family, was cautious, sly, beautifully educated, and generous when he had to be, and he had charisma. Seva held a respectable state post and in interviews said proudly of himself, “I’m a creator.” If dirty work was required, he didn’t have to get himself dirty anymore. Obliging hands were always found for that, but he had experienced that animal horror he’d known in his youth during brawls (and he’d been through all kinds) and never forgot it. Sometimes, to unwind, Vsevolod Mikhailovich would take a break and pay tribute to his old enthusiasm for the arts, which dated from his school days: photography and painting. He organized exhibits and went pub crawling with art students, touched by their childish bluntness and their modest demands on life. “Like bugs, they live on crumbs and are happy to have them, baby bugs, the muck of the earth, and we need that… the trees have to grow on something.” He and Masha laughed so hard, and Masha understood him perfectly, she was greedy for life, but a little too greedy…

They met on the Kryukov near the Torgovy Bridge, as agreed.

The light was already fading, the streetlamps were on, and there was a silvery reflection in the water of the St. Nicholas bell tower flickering in the dusk.

Masha uttered not a word of reproach to her man for being late. She pretended she’d been busy examining the cranes that crossed their long arrows, as if getting into a discussion.

“Look how wretched,” she said, waving her arm toward the new building.

“Check it out from another standpoint—an urbanist landscape, a clash of planes. It’s going to be a lot drearier when it’s all finished.”

He didn’t try to explain to her that at base a construction site was a clash of interests, not planes, and the loser was what was wretched.

Masha suddenly cried out. After the alarming fantasies that had overtaken her during her wait, she now imagined the water had splashed over the banks and touched her ankles.

“What’s up, kid?”

“Do you have a cigarette?”

Seva held out a pack, but it was odd because she didn’t smoke. Very occasionally, for photographs, she would toy with slim feminine cigarettes.

A couple of foreigners walked by. The man was lazily stroking the naked back of the woman, who was wearing an elegant evening dress. The couple were obviously counting on a long and pleasant night, a fitting cap to admiring the Petersburg landscapes.

“Well, where are we going?” Masha was hoping for a night in a good club, top-notch jazz, and she wouldn’t mind a drink, her nerves were completely shattered.

“Today I feel like wandering,” Seva said.

Really? Masha’s friend was only rarely visited by these desires, and she’d reconciled herself, but right now it was all wrong. She tried to nudge Seva toward the center of town. But he took her arm and, jokingly ordering her, pulled her along. As always in these instances, they strolled through Kolomna, where Seva had lived as a boy and until he’d bought himself a place not far from Palace Square. From time to time they came across beautifully restored buildings, but there were entire swaths of rental apartment buildings, the refuge of the newcomers who were barbarizing the city. The Kolomna where Pushkin’s poor Evgeny lost his marbles was still Kolomna, and the little Pryazhka River still bore its waters past Blok’s sadly famous insane asylum, now a museum. The museum could do its museum thing, but the crazies were going to be moved elsewhere. There was no reason to be crazy in the center of town, and the freed-up buildings could be turned into VIP mental hospitals

Kolomna was probably the city’s last district where lots of courtyards still weren’t barred and there weren’t formidable code locks on the gates. Seva dragged Masha through courtyards and secret passages for hours. She didn’t like walking around here at night, even with Seva, and now the only thing that reassured her was the fact that they probably had a bodyguard following discreetly on their heels. She cursed under her breath. Where was he taking her? A man to whom all doors were open and who was received everywhere with respect was traipsing through the streets and kissing in strangers’ spit-covered entryways! Why would he never ask her whether she liked doing it in stairwells when someone could walk up at any time? True, Masha herself never protested, and his swift, silent pressure was not as important to her as the relaxation that followed it and the weakness that spread over his face. Sometimes he even wept. She never told anyone about that, but she was immoderately proud of his tears. The bodily part of it barely roused her. This coldness had been in her since the very start of their romance, and she may have derived the most pleasure from the awareness that she had complete mastery, albeit not for long, over this strong, omnipotent man. How could she have known that he had never been hers for a second. His whole life had been slave to a single passion which she actually could have understood had she chosen to—the thirst for power.

It wasn’t love that softened his features and brought him to tears, but the pleasure of unlimited power over her breath and life. Today, in the empty attic where he’d brought her, this passion flared up with unusual heat, for he knew the end was nigh.

At some moment in their tryst he picked Masha up abruptly and spun her around, and then, as if going rigid, dropped her on the floor. She waited for Seva to help her get up, but he stepped to the side, and without moving watched her lying on the floor, smeared in the dust. Then Seva remembered himself and gave her a hand. “Sorry,” he said, and he kissed Masha’s forehead.

That was it. She was the past. Like all those who had already been wiped out, all those he’d beaten.

But right then, as if on purpose—this was all he needed—a photograph fell out of his pants pocket. A photograph of the pale corps de ballet moth with freckles au naturel. Nude.

Not much to look at. Not really worth photographing. It was obvious he’d taken it himself, sitting on the couch in his kitchen, and she was covering her breasts with her hands, the tramp. What had compelled him to carry around her photograph?

Masha started screaming, calling Seva bad words that surfaced from out of nowhere, since she’d never sworn before. They fought nastily and crudely, and the worst part was that toward the end he said to her with the most genuine contempt, “Who do you think you are? Look at yourself—an ordinary trade-school girl!”

He zipped up his pants and ran out, zigzagging through the courtyards.

Masha remained there a little longer, staring straight at the wall, then went downstairs slowly and cautiously and came out on Printers Union Street. She walked home, constantly tripping on construction debris. She walked that way and farther—past Theater Square, past the monument to Rimsky-Korsakov, and for another ten minutes or so through the nighttime streets, though it wasn’t so scary. She came to a halt on the Kryukov Canal. She had just been waiting here on this bridge for Seva. How much time had passed? Two hours, three?

The most terrible thing had come to pass. What she had feared most in this life. She was a mediocrity, a faded part of this gray, worm-eaten mass, a trade-school girl! This was exactly what she had hoped to avoid when she had made for the Petersburg air, rotten though it was! Why, oh why had this nightmare come crashing down on her head? Because she’d never loved her chronically ill mother? In childhood, at the sight of her, Masha had wanted to get away, flee, deny everything so as not to be saturated with the smell of illness and death… But she was just a child, pure and simple. Why was she being punished now?

Masha had heard many times about women getting left… certain kinds of women, but that couldn’t affect her. She couldn’t be abandoned… but she had been, and that meant she was like everyone else… Such inflated pride, such an inflated sense of herself in this world… and now she was a mediocrity, a nobody, and my God, she looked around—this theater and this square, the music, the dance, even the dance wasn’t for her… It wasn’t the dance that had abandoned her, though, but vice versa… Seva… Was he really to blame? He’d just noticed that the gilt had rubbed off and there was nothing underneath… How could there be nothing? She would show him yet. Masha tried to come up with an idea… maybe she would write a letter that would make him understand… But a terrible devastation fell over her, there was a void in her head, and that meant it was true, she was a nothing—and everyone already knew it… No, if she went to see him and begged on her knees, he would explain that he’d just been joking around, he’d been drunk! Yes, that must be it, he’d been drunk!

Masha had not been wrong about the bodyguard. He was watching her right now, hiding behind the construction vans on the embankment. But he was no longer guarding her body, for it had come detached and had ceased to be a part of his boss. Protector was now hunter.

There was the quick clicking of heels. Coming toward the bridge from Theater Square was a maidenly figure holding a single rose. Masha glimpsed the girl’s face and wasn’t surprised to encounter the very same freckles from Seva’s photograph. Time had become dense, as if it wanted to gather up all events and encounters in a single night.

The killer saw that Masha more than likely had asked for a light because the click of heels stopped and the girl with the rose was digging in her purse. Then a weak flame ignited, but she couldn’t get it to light for a moment because of the wind. Another minute and again the clicking of heels.

Masha took a drag, but again, as a few hours before, cold water from the canal splashed her. She leaned over the railing; the water was far away. Masha thought she saw a reflection slip by in it, or no, someone’s shadow, but the water bore it away, and then another shadow, and again the current carried it off.

The hunter saw Masha slowly begin to dance, as if hearing music and trying to fall in with the beat. Preparation, sissonne, pas de chat, chaînés… transition to grand jeté en rond… No, that’s wrong! She threw her arm up, as if tossing away the learned technique, and abruptly dropped it, slicing the air. The bitterness of loss in the broken and terrible movements of her elbows and knees, the spinning of freakish suffering, the impotence after birth and the flight, the clumsy, insane flight, the fall full-force, and the slow awakening. Her body was buffeted like a banner of despair, her dance was the dance of the shadow, the dance of the reflection, death dancing and an incredible revelation, so unlike anything she had known before. Too bad there was no one to appreciate the birth of this insane whirlwind that had suddenly settled in her.

There was only one spectator. He squeezed the trigger when the dancer was right at the bridge and, continuing her pas, bent over very low, as if she wanted to examine her own reflection in the water. The bullet did not interrupt her movement, and a second later the waters closed over.

Seva was walking through the courtyards alone. He had sent his bodyguard away. Let him do his job. He knew everything here, he’d grown up here. Each building was marked by a fight, kisses, humiliation, because he’d known that too, he hadn’t always been on top, sometimes he’d been way down below… Right now he felt himself at full strength, fixed into this life like a screw, and if he was meant to go to the bottom, he would take the whole boat down with him. His fears and the neurosis that had once made his eyelid twitch were now behind him.

It was torture being a teenager with a twitching eyelid. So he had conquered that tic. His dream of becoming the helmsman in this life had come to pass, and that meant it was God’s doing—if, of course, He existed. If not, all the better. That meant he had earned his helm without outside assistance. In any event, there were natural laws that were helping him make his way up the ladder. A flat-out sprint, thank God. Donkeys never advanced, capable only of obeying, unable to live without idols such as he was, without his firm hand and approving smile. He began making plans for tomorrow. He wasn’t thinking about Masha.

“Look at all the water that’s accumulated, I have to hurry… So?… Don’t take the violin? You’re sitting in your burrow, and you think you need everything. But you go out and what is this stuff for? I’ll just pack up the little statue, the china ballerina, I have to wipe the dust off her and wrap her up in newspaper… We have plenty of ballerinas here, the Mariinsky Theater is next door, they’re like windup toys there, but this one always sits here sad, lifeless, as if she were ill. Goddamnit! A foot broke off! Rats… And the music is too loud, my ears hurt, beautiful music, who’s playing, I don’t know—there, upstairs, or maybe I’m going mad because the mind is a boundary and I’m trying to erase things. This is all a joke, though. I see perfectly well that the dust has to be wiped away. But the water is flowing, still flowing, I guess I need to climb on the chair. Let not the water overflow me, neither let the deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth upon me.

“Here they are thinking they did me in… strange people, as if I could be done in. See, the flood has begun, I have to hurry, I’ll send for my things. Fine… there’s been so much that’s terrible I don’t have to be afraid anymore. I’m going away, yes, I said I’d send for my things, only I have to tell Masha. Here’s what she should be told: Dance, Masha!

“Masha! Hear me, Masha? Dance! Dance, Masha, otherwise were lost.”

Seva had just stopped to take out a cigarette when a heavy body fell on him from above. His head struck the ground and he no longer saw anything, he just felt a swift and powerful flow pull him along.

The comic death of a big shot killed by an old woman falling from her window—actually, it’s a sin to call her that since she wasn’t even sixty—kept newspaper readers entertained for quite a while.

Masha never was found, and they simply wrote her off as missing.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA FOREVER by Julia Belomlinsky Arts Square ^{Translated by Ronald Meyer}

We were walking along Italyanskaya Street.

Italyanskaya Street was empty.

Four thirty—the most unpopular time for White Nights.

All the carriages had started turning into pumpkins.

The coachmen into rats.

The crystal slippers fell off and shattered.

The ball dress turned out to be smeared with ashes.

The pumpkins rolled downhill to the bridges.

The rats readied themselves and were screwing around.

Everyone wanted to go home, but the metro was closed.

The early-morning chill had set in.

Puddles of vomit and shards of beer bottles everywhere.

The era of street-cleaning machines had not yet arrived.

But we were local, you see—guys from the district.

Long ago we had grown accustomed to the fact that if you were just going out to pay the electric bill on Millionaya Street, you’d run into Atlas holding up the sky.

Go straight—and you bump into the Hermitage.

To your left—the Capella Courtyards.

To your right—Kazan Cathedral…

“But why do you want to go to St. Isaac’s?”

My companion Lyokha Saksofon fully realized the “happiness” of living in the city center and hanging out in the district.

And he wrote this joyful song.

Now we were loudly singing it on the empty square:

And this, my friend, is my district and my city

That’s why my collar is raised high

That’s why I’m not wearing designer shoes

That’s who we are—that’s how we do it

What are you talking about! What are you talking about!

“Come on, Lyokha, roll one. Roll a couple right away, it’s pretty nice here. Pushkin is waving… We’ll leave him the roach… For the best poet, the best roach!”

We were already sitting on the bench and looking at Pushkin.

The bums who hang out on the square by the Dostoevsky monument are called Dostoevskies, and the ones on Pushkin Square are Pushkins. But there’s nobody here now… half past four, child’s play—and nobody’s here.

The Golden Triangle. Nothing ever happens here…

Two years ago, right outside the Hotel Europe, the English consul was robbed—and since then it’s been quiet. Every night the Phantom of the Opera is supposed to come out onto the roof of the Maly Opera and cry out like a muezzin: “All’s well in the Golden Triangle!”

Although it was precisely on that roof that something happened to one of my friends last winter.

It was Misha Bakaleishchikov—the Man from the Past.

The Man from the Past was supposed to come to the City of His Youth in search of his Past… It’s the usual move for an idiot.

I even envy him. He had come back for good to the little town of his childhood that’s green with mold…

Once he saved me. I was fifteen.

We had just come out on the Nevsky then for the first time— to make some money.

Three kids from the seventh grade. Sonya had a violin. Manya, a clarinet.

And I had a harmonica. And a black cap for the money. And all around us—deaf Soviet power. We managed to stand there for about four minutes. And then they took us by the hand and led us away… No, not the cops. Fyoka’s crew. The cops didn’t touch anybody…

So far, Fyoka’s crew hadn’t given them the go-ahead.

Fyoka’s crew—sounds good, right?

It’s like when Long John Silver in the movie version of Treasure Island asks, “Where’s Flint’s crew?”

And then later, when they’re still on the brigantine:

The Jolly Roger waves in the wind—-

Flint’s crew is singing a ditty…

We all sang that song when we were in the Young Pioneers.

The brigantine—that was the most important part.

The pirates raised the brigantine’s sails on the high blue seas.

And somehow that got mixed up with Alexander Grin’s Scarlet Sails.

All the cafés were called that.

And the clubs where the young people were supposed to spend their leisure time.

Young Pioneer groups.

Scarlet Sails. Or the Brigantine. Or Romance.

That’s what our romance was like…

But it turned out that the pirates’ sea wasn’t so very far away after all—it was right there in front of us, on the banks of the Neva.

And Flint’s crew was there as well.

They made their journey on scarlet sails. Or grew up right there.

Out of the slime and dampness…

They sent the young people into ecstasy, trembling.

Flint’s crew—that was really something.

The fucking corsairs! The fucking corsairs! The corsairs.

We thought that they were in opposition to the powers that be. That they weren’t any worse than the dissidents—fighters and heroes.

As a matter of fact, I don’t know what it was like in Moscow, but in Piter their relationship with the powers that be was precisely as if they were real corsairs.

The powers that be had been living off their thieving for quite some time.

In Piter all the cops were taken care of.

Once Sasha Bashlachov came up with this metaphor about us and the West: “You’re still between the spoon and the lie, and we’re still between the wolf and the louse.”

The wolves, you see, were these corsairs of ours.

The KGB of those days was probably the louse. Which didn’t hunt for real criminals, but for the shitty bohemians.

Catching poets was an entirely lousy occupation. And they gave you ten years for smoking a joint…

And the Wolves weren’t your usual criminals.

It was our Young Capitalism.

Our Nascent Bootlegging.

In our Northern Old Chicago.

The people were being dressed by the black-marketeers.

The hard-currency girls were teaching the Kama Sutra.

Shadow capitalists were setting up factories.

Somewhere in the depths of Kupchino, simple Soviet people were making fifteenth-century Saxon porcelain. Even the fact that porcelain wasn’t invented until the eighteenth century didn’t stop them.

Well, naturally, the Underwater Kingdom needed poets like it needed a hole in the head. But artists and musicians could sometimes find work. Somebody had to draw all those stencils and sketches, and the musicians attended to the leisure.

The life of a corsair is simple: battle on the seas, and an endless holiday on shore—that is, a tavern with some tunes and babes.

A lot of people worked in the taverns. And I’d been singing in one since I was sixteen…

It was right then, during that period, that everything was possible. Because nothing was impossible.

And the laws didn’t work for shit. I started singing a year and a half after that first appearance on the Nevsky…

Then the corsairs took us gently by the arm and led us away. And they led us to the Ulster, Fyoka’s port of hail. Flint’s crew gathered there every night.

We wept. We said that we were in the seventh grade. We said, “Guys, we won’t do it again…”

They didn’t beat us. This first time they explained that anyone who wanted to sell something on the Nevsky—no matter what—needed to come to an agreement with the corsairs and pay up. It was all very simple. Musicians were already working on the Nevsky. And the artists were pushing masks of some kind and pottery.

And everybody paid off the corsairs, while the corsairs paid off—again, not the cops, but higher up—the KGB itself. Everything concerned with hard cash was the fiefdom of the KGB. And not the cops. Although the cops of course also got in on the action sometimes.

The Nevsky started getting wild when the tourists arrived.

And when there weren’t any tourists, you had the Finnish construction workers.

But we were little schoolkids, so they took pity on us and let us go after we gave our word that we wouldn’t show our faces on the Nevsky with our music.

They threw us out like the trash.

We had such an immature look about us—skinny and underdeveloped.

But I very much wanted to be part of that life. I managed to fall in love with one of the guys, the one who held me by my collar as he led me there and back.

He was either Fyoka’s right hand… or the left one…

And I started going there. They would chase me away right when Fyoka would make his appearance. He was a well-known sadist. But he wasn’t a fucking pedophile.

He really liked manhandling girls. But all his girls were real blondes, with tits and asses…

These Russian Barbies. With long blond hair… These Barbie babes.

And then I was emaciated and tall—well, like I am now. Dark, short hair.

Definitely an underground look, just for him.

And the other corsairs found me to their liking.

Or did I simply like this circus around me?

They found it somewhat amusing that he wouldn’t allow me to go to the Ulster.

And I became particularly friendly with the barmen. I was always sitting there at the bar, drinking coffee with cognac.

Later, they stopped chasing me away. Even when Fyoka was there.

I would sit quietly and watch them. And listen to music.

And of course, just like in the movies, I knew by heart the entire repertoire of the group that played there.

Then one fine day I finally got up the nerve and butted in— they were playing cards. Twenty-one.

I said that I wanted to play one-on-one with Fyoka.

That was me showing off in front of the guy I was in love with. He didn’t give a fuck, but he laughed at the situation along with everyone else.

Fyoka said: “Let’s play. But if you lose, we’ll take you with us today. And then we’ll really play…”

There were rumors that they had taken one girl to some wasteland, poured gas on her, and set her on fire… I’m not sure if that’s true, but their working girls were always walking around broken and shattered and ending up in the hospital— those weren’t rumors.

I knew all that. Since I was fifteen.

And I didn’t need to brazen it out.

But in general there was no stopping me.

It was probably the effect of the coffee and cognac.

Of course I lost.

And then our Captain Flint said, “You’re a very brave girl. But now we’re going to test you and see what you’re made of. You don’t want us to take you with us? Well then, we can try this: our brave girl puts her little hands on the table now and we’ll put out our cigarettes on them. If the little girl doesn’t yell, we’ll let her go home. And if she yells—we’ll take her with us.”

There were seven corsairs besides him, and of course each one applied his cigarette for a second. Only for a second. But nobody refused to do it—-they had their own rules.

And then the captain said: “Now I’ll show you how to put out a cigarette.” He touched me with it and held it there, well, for what seemed like a hundred years. Probably all of a minute. But I didn’t cry out, I was determined to remain silent, like a partisan…

This scar here, the big round one from the captain’s cigarette, is always visible, while the other seven are small and faded.

But the point is, I didn’t cry out. And Fyoka said that I could go wherever I damn well pleased… since I’m such a brave girl.

My teeth were chattering, but I still had the strength to make out that I was okay, and I said that I’d sit for a bit and drink my coffee.

And I still had enough strength to get to the women’s bathroom. And there the girls started shouting at me: “Piss on her hands! Quick, piss!” Then they wrapped my hands in napkins soaked with urine. I felt such pain that I let out a howl and collapsed to the floor.

And there and then the barman flew into the women’s restroom, picked me up, got me outside, and took me to his place.

He lived with his mother, Larisa Mikhalna.

Of course, that wasn’t typical of the real corsairs, or of those who were simply real criminals. Well, just like in the Russian classics.

Here in our Petersburg swamp mafia—strange as it might seem—almost everybody had parents. After all, there were a lot of Jews and half-Jews. And a lot of Armenians among the newcomers to the city. Not so much your military peoples as your trading ones.

The Russian boys, on the whole, were from the intelligentsia. The hard-currency girls also somehow turned out to have mothers—hairdressers, nurses, teachers, shop assistants…

And this barman was none other than Misha Bakaleishchikov.

I lived with them for two weeks, and Larisa Mikhalna nursed me back to health. She smeared me with some special creams. My mother was at the dacha. And in general she didn’t pay much attention, since she was busy with her latest affair.

But Flint’s crew started to respect me after this incident. And they accepted me not as one of the girls, but something like Jim the cabin boy.

In 1937, in the worst fucking time of the Stalin era, a Soviet version of Treasure Island was released. The plot was changed a great deal: the heroes were now Irish rebels. For some reason, the action was switched from Scotland to Ireland. They didn’t need treasure, they needed to buy weapons to fight the English imperialists for the freedom of Ireland, their homeland. And the main hero is a girl named Jenny.

This Jenny loves Dr. Livesey. She gets fixed up as a cabin boy on the Hispaniola, after dressing up like one, and now they call her Jim the cabin boy. Some red-headed girl wearing trousers is clearly playing the part. And like all girls playing trouser roles, she’s got short, fat legs and a fat, round butt.

In general, it’s first-class. And the script had to be like that. Because in a romantic society—and under Stalin, society was superromantic—heroes couldn’t love money for the sake of money. They had to love more important things, like freedom, the Fatherland… It was impossible simply to love cold, hard cash.

And, well, it was stupid simply to love cold, hard cash. Even though a lot of people do love it… And one could also love power. Fyoka probably loved the power he wielded over his schooner more than the girls. Many of them loved the game. The process of the game. And of course it was precisely the bucks that the shadow capitalists loved. I don’t believe that any of them loved manufacturing Saxon porcelain or those Japanese kerchiefs…

And there, on this Petersburg pirate schooner of ours, I turned out to be Jim the cabin boy. My idiot’s dream had come true—I was proud and happy.

These scars on my hands were like my initiation—they had accepted me, they had taken me aboard the schooner.

And they had accepted me not for my cunt, but for my bravery and determination. Me and lots of my peers had made a cult of these guys. I was fifteen and they were victorious heroes to me.

Not victors over the KGB, not the Wolves who were victorious over the Louse, but rather the Wolves from Vysotsky.

They’d jumped over the fence, knocked down the flags, victors over the hunters.

Victors over the system.

That’s how it seemed to me then. About the Louse, it’s only now that I understand. But then, when I was fifteen: “The Jolly Roger flaps in the wind.”

And another old song, this time from Jack London:

The wind howls, the sea rages

We corsairs will not surrender

We stand, back to back, by the mast

The two of us—against a thousand!

Now isn’t that super?

Well, so that’s when I started singing. First there, in the Ulster. And later at the Troika. And then in various places…

At the same time we were going to school somewhere, and received our superfluous Soviet diplomas. I had studied for a period at the school of the Ministry of Culture.

There was this young dude who played the Fano in the Ulster… Simply a phenomenal ear. And he was studying engineering. Because his dad wanted him to.

And Misha and I are still friends; well, he helped me to get on board the schooner—my singing is all thanks to him.

All the more so as I was still a minor. And he had been a student at some point in that same institute of the Ministry of Culture, only he was seven years older than me…

We’d run out of pot… And the sun had already started to shine through Pushkin.

Small birds perched on Pushkin’s head: sparrows and pigeons. While large birds flew around: crows and seagulls. And all of them were crying out in their own language. So let’s say the sparrows chirped, while the pigeons squawked melodically. But those large birds were making monstrous sounds, particularly for a person who’d just had a good smoke and wanted some peace. All that wailing and moaning and horror. It seemed astonishing that the language of birds is called “song.” But we still didn’t want to leave the nice little square. We of course had a serious case of the munchies, though we were too lazy to do anything about it, particularly since all the places open at night were so unappetizing. So it made sense to be patient and wait until Prokopych or Freakadelic opened up, right here on the square.

Although it was clear that we wouldn’t make it here in this little square till nine.

Lyokha had some more grass in his little Indian jar…

The seagulls and crows had ascended and flown off to the roof of the Maly Opera…

Misha Bakaleishchikov, the Man from the Past, made his appearance then like a bolt out of the blue.

In late February.

And not from the States, but from London for some reason.

He found me—he’d searched me out specially.

We were sitting in a café—at the Hotel Europe, on that very same square. We were in the midst of a terribly slippery winter thaw—-black ice.

We talked about the Past.

We said to each other, “Give me a cigarette…”

Misha’s wife had left him.

The fifth one or the third.

“It’s because you smoke grass from morning till night!”

In London he had been working at some mythical Russian radio station.

But he vaguely hinted at his close ties to personages out of favor. Either Gusya or Beryozy (a.k.a. Gusinsky or Berezovsky)…

“In general, I can do anything! Well, I can make your any wish come true! What do you want? Do you want me to take you to London tomorrow?”

“I want… London is too easy now. Let me think a minute… In fairy tales they always give you three wishes. And here you’re giving me only one. So that means I need to come up with something really fucking hard…”

“Well, come on, think up something hard. If I make it come true, will you marry me?”

“Why the hell do you want to marry me? I’m forty—”

“Five. I remember. Well, I already married a young one. Sveta, the last one, was young. I’m tired of her. And I never married you . .

“And you always dreamed of it?”

I started laughing. And so did Misha. He’d never dreamed of it. He’s always been married, as long as I’ve known him. First it was the deputy director of the Beryozka store. Then a Finn, a Swede, a famous ballerina, and a famous model. All his marriages facilitated the “machine of social advancement,” as he put it.

In bed, handsome as he inhaled the obligatory cigarette: “You understand, my girl, that I can’t marry you. I long ago turned into a machine of my own social advancement…”

There was a time when I would get excited by the frequent visits of the elegant Bakaleishchikov—driving either a Mazda or a Honda.

Restaurants and cafés, spending the night in expensive hotels, carefree sex of an athletic bent with all kinds of interesting foreign doodads…

I said, “Come on, knock it off, roll us one.”

And he sang me the song from Easy Rider:

Don’t bogart that joint, my friend

Pass it over to me

Don’t bogart that joint, my friend

Pass it over to me

And he explained that contemporary English has this verb “to bogart.”

“It comes from Humphrey Bogart—I swear! It appeared after the movie The Roaring Twenties. Bogart is in a foxhole with Jimmy Cagney, and Cagney lets Bogart have a puff of his cigarette, but Bogart smokes it down to nothing with one draw and doesn’t leave anything for Cagney… It’s a verb from the hippie days: don’t ‘bogart’ that joint, pass it on to the next guy… The Roaring Twenties. But for some reason here it was called The Soldier’s Fate in America. Even though they’re soldiers only for the first five minutes of the movie, it’s just that one scene in the foxhole. And then all of sudden they’re fucking bootleggers…But you probably didn’t see this movie… By your time it had probably already disappeared from the rerun theaters. But I remember it… Still, there’s a seven-year difference—that’s a lot. And it’s particularly noticeable when discussing movies… oh, and music too… And Easy Rider wasn’t screened in the Soviet Union until we had VCRs…”

“Come on, knock it off, roll the joint…”

And here we are together once more. And he even has a room in the Hotel Europe again. And the bed as before is more of an athletic field than a meditation space. It’s a strange setting for smoking weed…

He started talking about old movies again. Turns out he has an uncle in America.

“Go figure, Anya, he’s got the same name—Misha Bakaleishchikov! And he worked as a composer in Old Hollywood, composed music for movies Bogart was in. And Lauren Bacall. Real first-class film scores… They showed them in the rerun theater on Vaska, remember? Some were spoils of war, others came from Lend-Lease… And I taught you how to raise your eyes when you’re getting a light…”

Then we reminisced about our old gang, made up of various inhabitants of the square.

The times when we were all hanging out in the inner courtyard of the Maly Opera.

The scenery model studio was in a former admiral’s apartment—an enfilade of communicating rooms, and there was a corridor on one side as well. The theater had appropriated the house; there were empty, uninhabited rooms above and below. You could enter this courtyard simply through the gate—there wasn’t any security.

In the mid-’80s a whole group of artists worked there.

And they all dragged along their friends. Other artists would go there, and musicians too… Actors from the nearby theaters— the Operetta, Komisarshevskaya, and Comedy theaters…

And the corsairs would go there… the blackmarket guys, hard-currency girls… prostitutes from the Hotel Europe.

And the artsy bimbos—the girlfriends of the poets—always to be found in this sort of gathering…

The artists had funny names: Nemkov, Nemtsov, and Nemchinov. And another two were named Tabachnik and Pasechnik.

The arrival to the studio of a guy named Bakaleishchikov made everybody’s day, for sure.

Tabachnik, Pasechnik, and Bakaleishchikov were close friends. Nemkov, Nemtsov, and Nemchinov, fought constantly. And Kit would pull them apart…

Kit bound the whole gang together, he made models for all of them.

And they often fought to get closer to Kit. In the very first room stood an enormous bathtub, and Kit kept his axolotls there. One day he had an argument with the fire inspectors, who came back later and poisoned his axolotls.

Kit also collected old irons.

I once got mad at Tabachnik and threw an iron at his head. Thank God I missed, because it could have killed him.

I was always throwing and hitting people over the head with bottles—for nothing at all.

Since childhood. Why did I do it? Life is a battlefield.

Sometimes fights would break out there in the studio— drunken artists having it out, no worse than the corsairs.

But not because of Kit. And not because of some dough. The fights, more often than not, were on account of girls. You know: don’t bogart that joint, you son of a bitch—pass it to your friend!

“Anya, do you remember that time when you went to Odessa with Afrikan and his whole gang, and you were doing some bullshit music for some nursery or something, and you pretended to be a singing teacher who taught kids jazz and rock, and Kit was in love with you and called you every day from the studio on the office phone, and you explained to him that somebody had swindled you, that you didn’t have anything to eat, so you were going to sell yourself because you were starving…?”

“No, that’s not how it was! I said very nicely that I was going to live according to the laws of the front line, and to put out for anybody who would feed me supper. And in general there in Odessa, and that year in particular, it was a fucking disaster. That was the year when the sailors were forbidden from selling things to the secondhand stores. And they closed the flea market… There wasn’t any food at all in the stores in Odessa!”

“Ah yes, the decline of the empire… And you, you singing bitch, were having a gay old time in your hotel with film directors and Moscow artists… You even bragged later on that you fucked that old guy who filmed Bumbarash.”

“Yeah, that was Felya, our cameraman, he was wonderful… Fed me and then dropped me, said he didn’t have long to live so he couldn’t hang around with one girl, he still needed to fit in a lot more… And then there was that old actor from Kyrgyzstan, he was great, you know, the one who played the Tatar prince in Audrey Rublyov; he also played the teacher in that movie First Teacher… But he was really old and a complete drunk, and I up and left him…”

“And then, you sordid gerontophile, you told poor Kityarushka that you had to betray him with seven different Chuvaks… and he would tell us everything. We reminisced that since you were fifteen you were nicknamed Nyusha Zeppelin because you were so out of control… And then Kit stared at us with his drunken rabbit eyes and muttered something like: So what is it that you want to tell me? That Anyas a whore? And that you all slept with her? But you all slept with her before I even knew her. While I, on the other hand, slept with all of your wives, when they were already your wives… So then the troops got a bit jumpy… Kolya Punin took offense and left right away, and never had anything to do with any of us ever again, and the rest of them turned out to be some serious businessmen and started to fuck with Kit… But for some reason I was on his side… I already had Yukka then, and would have been only too happy for her if one of my friends had given her a good fuck, because I was having a hard time of it… Anya, I don’t remember, did Kit get high with us? Or was it strictly booze with him… and a bit of snatch?”

“Listen, he was such a hard drinker that he barely had the time to smoke pot with us.”

“But he didn’t really drink that much; it just seemed that way to you. He gambled left and right, so booze was the easiest thing to get.” Misha burst out laughing. “He was two-timing you all the way. Said that he’d fallen asleep drunk somewhere, and you, fool that you are, believed him.”

“No, I didn’t, but I could always find him when I wanted to. Sometimes he’d be held up because of the bridges, but I could still show up at his place at five in the morning, as soon as the bridges were down. Once I really did lose him, but it later turned out that he’d fallen asleep in that very same studio and they simply rolled him under the sofa so he wouldn’t get in the way of the dancing and so that nobody would stumble over him. No, Kit didn’t spend his nights sleeping with other girls in a comfortable bed. No fucking way… His cheating on me was heroic, accomplished under difficult circumstances: in cars, bathrooms, upstairs—above the studio, in an empty apartment… on the ‘fucking’ chair. Remember the ‘fucking’ chair? Tabachnik brought it for one of his girls. And then we all used it… In general, Kit was a fine, one-of-a-kind drunk. And his golden fingers would shake in the mornings…”

“In your diamond cunt, and you liked that a lot.”

“Everybody goes on about something, for the soldier it’s a cunt…” Misha wanted to talk about love. But I’d started thinking about Kit: “And they killed him in a drunken fight!”

“Anya, what are you saying? What, do you still believe that it was a drunken fight? Come on now, you’re not a complete fool!”

“What do you mean?”

“Anya, it was all for show. I thought you knew…”

“For show? What had he done that was so terrible? Was it because of some bimbo? I remember there was one of Fyoka’s lady friends, some Marinka Zhalo or other… Was it because of her? The whore… The opera Carmen… with fucking tramps…”

“I don’t know for sure. Maybe it was girls… No, it couldn’t have been because of girls… Must have been on account of the knock-offs. They all sat there in that studio turning out fakes. That whole group—all those lefties forging fleas. The guys were making money hand over fist. There were a lot of orders for restoration jobs, and right after the restorations there were the orders for knock-offs…”

Of course, I remember this “Restoration” period. It was like being in a DIY club. There were ornaments, paintings, sometimes furniture. I once even helped cut out a rose from a sheet of veneer for a marquetry side table. Petals and leaves. The veneer was multicolored, I used a stencil. They even trusted me. And Linas came separately to pour the bronze angels… There were also some antique models from the museum, drawings… I remember the girl Tabachnik bought the chair for there too, and she was painting old drawings with delicate watercolors… And there were even arguments, it was either Nemkov or Nemchinov who said that they should be done with pastels, but she insisted that no, only watercolors, and she painted them according to the album that she had of these drawings—scenes of St. Petersburg… “Misha, but why Kit in particular? Nothing happened to the others…”

“Because he was, like, independent. The others all worked for particular people. And everything went far away to somewhere in Georgia… I don’t know exactly. And suddenly he had his own client. As a matter of fact, they met here in the Hotel Europe. You can’t reconstruct now what happened then. But it seems like it was somebody else’s dough. And, consequently, different rules. He crossed somebody, something went over there, and it turned out that good people ended up in a tough spot. I’m talking some serious bucks. I don’t know the details, but it was something like that… But when they killed him, you weren’t living with him anymore, were you? You were already with the next one… Who was it? The King of Jazz?”

“The Phantom of the Opera… It was the Phantom of the Opera! Once and forever.”

Later we were sitting downstairs again in the cafeteria that they now call a “lounge.”

We were chatting again and remembering the Past. Some different Past now, either afterward or before… Turns out that there was a lot of this fucking Past.

Misha grew sad. “You don’t change, Anya—why don’t you change?”

“I changed in the middle. At thirty, thirty-five. And then after forty I somehow lost weight again… It’s old age. The end of my blossoming.”

“Your old age looks like youth. Your legs are spaghetti-thin again, and your face is just like it was then. Come on, let’s go… It’s lonely for me there…”

“Hey, don’t bogart that joint, friend, take a puff and pass it on to your friend… But I did come up with my wish: I want to go up on the Maly’s roof. Like we did then. Remember how we liked to go out there on summer nights? You could easily climb up from the roof of the studio.”

“Well, that’s a fucking stupid wish. Not even interesting, roofers probably working there now. And it’s slippery. And easy as pie.”

“No, it’s not as easy as pie. It’s hard to get in the Maly now. There’s a serious security system.”

“I can’t get in? Are you kidding?”

Misha’s last job before going abroad was assistant administrator of the Maly State Opera Theater. It’s called the Mikhailovsky now.

“They’ve got an ID card system to get in now. Electronic cards. Different kinds. With one card you can go certain places, and with another card to different ones; most of the cards don’t let you go everywhere. So if you’re all-powerful, take me to our roof, that’s my dream. If you take me to the roof, I’ll go with you to London.”

“Easy, Anya, that’s easy!… If you want to go to the roof, we’ll go to the roof—I’ll be your Phantom of the Opera!”

I didn’t believe that it would be possible.

But there we were—standing on the very same roof.

We entered the building like theatergoers. And there at the coat check we ducked behind a hidden door; he opened it with a card, we ended up on a hidden staircase and walked up it for a long time, and then we hid in a little closet. We had to wait until the performance ended and everybody left.

It was all quite complicated. There in the theater, besides the ever-watchful old biddies and ushers, you had the security guards with their Tasers.

The degree of security in the theater under the new director reminded me of a military factory in the USSR. Bakaleishchikov proved to be a real hero. He had managed somehow to get a card that gave him unlimited access.

And he remembered all the hidden doors and rooms.

“How can you remember after so many years?”

“I’m usually quite scattered.”

“That’s the weed.”

“Well, yes, Sveta said the same thing. But it’s the opposite with unnecessary things, you see—those I remember.”

“Why the fuck are you smoking grass from morning till night…?”

While we were sitting in the closet, we once again reminisced about our Maly Opera life.

I was a Petersburger and so was Misha Bakaleishchikov.

And the whole gang was made up of artists who had come from elsewhere a hundred years ago to study scenic design at the theater school.

They’d all become friends in the dorm.

Nemkov, Nemtsov, and Nemchinov were from the Urals and Siberia, and Tabachnik and Pasechnik were from western Ukraine.

Nemchinov, however, was a Tatar from Kazan. Misha was the one who remembered that. How does he remember everything after smoking grass first thing in the morning?

We walked up the concealed flight of stairs and came out onto the roof. Like we used to. Only then it was usually summer and White Nights.

For some reason it doesn’t occur to anyone to clamber onto the roof in winter. This was the first time on the roof in winter.

There wasn’t any wind.

It wasn’t cold.

“It’s a few degrees above freezing today.”

There wasn’t any of Petersburg’s bewitching beauty.

There wasn’t any hyperborean ice.

All around there was streaming, squelching, crunching…

On the square lay lumps of black snow.

“Careful, Anya, don’t slip.”

“It’s okay, there isn’t any ice. It’s all melted. Come here, I want to show you something. Come on, step over that railing, otherwise you won’t see anything…

There was an empire-style minifence lower than your knee, and beyond it a little piece of open roof about a meter and a half wide—it was from there that you could see farther.

Bakaleishchikov was absolutely fucking blown away by the view from here of the dreadful square, made a shambles by black snowdrifts and mud… Although to me it was still beautiful. But on the whole, a terrifying sight. You expect more from Petersburg. Even in winter…

He presented a monologue. Classical in all respects. About how all of us who live here are assholes.

He stood on the edge of the roof wearing his black overcoat, flapping in the wind, and was shouting almost hysterically, and his scarf fluttered like a red banner…

“All our life here—it’s a fucking Dostoevsky nightmare! One big czar asshole named Nastaysa Filippovna! Humiliation stronger than pride. Allegedly there’s beauty here. Anya, what kind of fucking beauty is there here? Anya, there is rot here, this fucking Piter is rotting, do you understand, it’s rotting just like Venice… only Venice is rotting in a civilized manner, but this, this spawn of bullshit is decaying at will—in the broad expanses of the north. And nothing can stop it from fucking rotting, not UNESCO, not DICKESCO… Snow, Anya, ought to be white! White, do you understand? Bears are white and brown—and that’s normal. But snow should be white! And only white! Here we have the kingdom of fucking black grime and slime. Nothing but fucking, fucking, fucking, damned fucking noir!”

My heart was pounding. And my head was pounding. From fear. He’s not coordinated. He smokes grass from morning till night. He won’t manage. He’ll lose his footing. He won’t grab hold of me.

I pushed him hard in the back with two hands—forward.

He didn’t manage to keep his footing. He didn’t grab hold of me. Nothing was “like it is in the movies.”

He flew down, like a deer, with a shout.

Smashed to smithereens.

No fucking good smoking weed from morning till night.

I didn’t care what happened to me afterward.

They didn’t keep me for very long.

The investigator was young and handsome.

The medical expert was young and lazy.

They could have done some special tests and come to the conclusion that he wasn’t responsible, that somebody had pushed him from behind. But they could also choose not to do any tests.

And not come to any conclusion. And that was clearly more expedient.

Seems I’m a born actress.

I wept naturally and said that he was my friend and what a terrible thing it was! And they found absolutely no motive whatsoever for my doing it.

The prematurely deceased guy was a Russian citizen, he didn’t even have a European passport, just three different “places of residence.”

So why go to a lot of trouble?

Misha left behind seven children from five wives. The youngest son was already fifteen.

Of course, I’d like to be able to tell all this to Lyokha Saksofon. My comrade-in-arms in the group Anyuta and the Angels. He’s the main angel. And even more of an archangel with a heavy golden trumpet.

Lyokha Saksofon probably couldn’t have pictured me as a murderer. I was a heroine to him. Just putting together my group Anyuta and the Angels, and somehow managing to feed myself and four musicians—that meant a lot in our closed and stagnant city. Everybody was pushing and shoving here on our little square—there wasn’t much money, or much fame. And you needed to somehow elbow your way in and squeeze out the others.

Lyokha could never do that. The only thing in life he knew how to do was to blow into his pipe, into the archangel’s gilded trumpet.

And I became legendary for surviving the ‘90s with two small children, and how when I was left a widow I sang in gangsters’ hangouts and clubs.

Once I was shot at by the owner of some casino who was high on cocaine, and he was hauled away by six guys…

Well then, even if Misha had performed a completely different monologue, one about his love for Piter, I still wouldn’t have spared him. I had sentenced him to death, and had led him to his personal place of execution. Onto the stage set of his personal death…

Because the Man from the Past always has some story like that… about the Past. From which it becomes clear that he is not long for this world. That he’s already lost.

Everybody mixes up who’s the father of my children. Because there were two fathers: my first daughter was with Tabachnik, and the second one was with Kit.

But since Kit practically raised the first one from birth, she was also considered Kit’s girl.

Kit always had a hell of a lot of work. At the Maly Opera he was on staff as a modeler. And there he only needed to make Tabachnik one official model a season for the current production.

But all the rest of the models were made to order—for Tabachnik, if they were going to other theaters, and for the rest of the merry band. Later there were also military models, which in the late ‘80s brought in orders from collectors, when the theater business became superquiet as the result of the usual revolution.

Kit of course was a drunkard. The most natural drunkard. The classic Russian master drunkard. His heart belonged to the tavern.

He spent most of his time in the Maly Opera studio, which according to the theater’s inventory, both movable and immovable property, was the “modeling” studio. But he divided the rest of his time among three restaurants of the All-Russian Theater Society. One was upstairs—formal—one was in the basement, and the third was simply a little café-buffet. He didn’t like the Hotel Europe. Not because our corsairs went there, but because his clients went there, particularly during those final years. Refined, elegant collectors who ordered one-of-a-kind models of famous battles. With all kinds of little soldiers and machinery. And all this was on a scale of one-to-twenty. And sometimes even smaller. And they paid a lot by the standards of those days.

For some reason this made him nervous.

He would probably have become an alcoholic, but he didn’t have the chance.

And perhaps I would have left him; on the whole I was reckless.

But I didn’t have the chance to leave him.

They often started fighting when they got drunk. And one day he got killed in a fight.

Foolishly, accidentally. They punctured his spleen.

Bang!… and the boy’s gone. And this was before all the big guns came to Petersburg.

That’s what I thought for twenty whole years.

And would have gone on thinking.

Were it not for that conversation with Misha.

When it happened, among our group only he, Bakaleishchikov, was married, to the Finn, and he was already, like, living there, and would rush back and forth.

And it was so obvious that he had set this all up.

This superorder, for a super-knock-off, for superbucks.

And he surrendered Kit. Nobody else could have done it.

And to surrender meant to…

It was very much accepted among the corsairs.

In general, to surrender your own is accepted in any criminal milieu, going back to the real John Silver.

The wind howls, the sea rages

We, the corsairs, will never surrender…

What a fucking lie, what a big fucking lie… We’ll surrender, and how!

And so I thought up this complicated punishment to be executed from that roof.

I decided that God would be the arbiter. That it was almost a bit of a duel.

I consider it to be a duel, because it’s a miracle that he turned out to be so uncoordinated. He didn’t grab onto me at the last moment and drag me with him.

Although he did grab me and drag me with him. Because now I am a murderer and betrayer just like him. The evil in the world has increased because of me…

But all the same, Kit won’t come back. And Misha of course had no idea that Kit was such an important person to me. Misha thought that he was still the main man in my life. And Kit was considered a loser, at least according to the standards of the corsairs… And for the artists he was a loser too, poorly educated, merely a craftsman…

Not one of them understood that Kit was my Phantom of the Opera. Once and forever.

And it doesn’t make any sense to tell this story to Lyokha Saksofon.

He never knew Kit or Misha Bakaleishchikov.

He’s twenty-five, and he’s being tormented by Kira. Or is it Lera…?

We sat on the bench, looking at Pushkin.

Little birds and fliers for our group Anyuta and the Angels were flying all around.

The Man from the Past was dead.

The Woman with the Past was rolling a joint.

Don’t bogart that joint, my friend

That one’s burned to the end,

Roll another one

Just like the other one…

Author’s Note: Sanya Yezhov wrote the song “This, My Friend, Is My District and My City.”